How to play

Twenty-eight cards are dealt into seven columns, one face up on each and the rest hidden underneath. The other twenty-four wait in the stock, top left. Your job is to build all four suits up from ace to king on the foundations, top right.

In the columns, a card lands only on a card one rank higher of the opposite colour — a red six on a black seven. Whole runs move together. Empty a column and only a king may take the space, so clearing one is a decision, not a free win. Every time you take the last face-up card off a column, the card beneath it turns over, and that is the real currency of the game.

Click the stock to turn cards onto the waste pile beside it; the top one is in play. When the stock runs out, click it again to turn the waste back over. Drag a card where you want it, or click it once to pick it up and click again to send it to the best place the rules allow.

Controls

• Drag — carry a card or a run to a column or a foundation
• Click — pick a card up; click a destination to drop it
• Click twice — send the card wherever the rules allow, foundation first
• Space or D — turn the next cards from the stock
• Z or U — undo (as far back as you like)
• R — restart this game
• N — a new random game
• Esc — put the picked-up card down

Strategy tips

• Turn cards over before anything else. A move that exposes a face-down card is almost always better than one that does not, because the cards you cannot see are the only thing standing between you and the win.
• Take from the biggest pile first. Given a choice of two columns that both work, uncover the one with more cards hidden under it — that is where the game is won or lost.
• Do not empty a column without a king ready. An empty column you cannot fill is a wasted slot, and the king you want may be the last card in the stock.
• Hold cards back from the foundations. A five sent up too early cannot catch the four you need to unload later. Auto-play only promotes cards that have been proved safe for exactly this reason.
• Count the stock in draw three. Which cards you can reach depends on where the pile splits, so playing a card you do not need can shift the whole cycle and unlock one you do.
• There is a way through. Every game here was finished by a solver before it was offered to you, so a dead end is a wrong turn rather than a bad deal. Undo back to the last card you turned over and take the other branch.

About Klondike

Klondike is the game most people mean by "solitaire". It is named after the Yukon gold rush that made it popular in the 1890s, and it became the most played computer game in the world when Microsoft bundled it with Windows 3.0 in 1990 — originally to teach people how to use a mouse.

Every game here is rebuilt from its number, so nothing is stored and a number is all you need to hand somebody the exact game you played. Turn on draw one for a gentler game; draw three is the Windows default and the harder of the two.

Most Klondike deals you meet elsewhere are simply dealt, and a good few of them cannot be won no matter how well you play. Not these. Every game in this collection was handed to a solver that can see the face-down cards, and only the ones it actually finished are here — with the winning line played back through the same rules you are bound by, as proof. Lose one and it was a mistake, not a bad deal.

That is not the same as saying it is easy. Unlike FreeCell, where all fifty-two cards are face up from the first second, Klondike hides most of the deal, so knowing a game can be won tells you nothing about the order to turn the cards in. Undo is unlimited here, so a line that dead-ends costs you nothing but the time.