Klondike Solitaire: the complete guide to the game everyone calls patience

Ask almost anyone in New Zealand to picture a game of cards played alone and they will describe Klondike: seven columns running down the table, a pile of cards waiting in the corner, and four empty spaces to fill with Aces and everything that follows them.

This page is the long-form guide. It covers where the game comes from, what every part of the table is called, the full rules as this site plays them, and a gentle walk through your very first game. If you would rather go straight to the odds and figures, our Solitaire page has them; here we keep the numbers to a handful and concentrate on helping you play well.

A short history of Klondike

Klondike is old. The earliest written rules found so far appeared in the 1907 edition of Hoyle's Games, under the name "Seven-Card Klondike", and by the 1913 edition of the Official Rules of Card Games it was known simply as Klondike. Where the name itself came from is genuinely unknown. Some writers have guessed at a link with the Klondike Gold Rush of the late nineteenth century, but, as the Wikipedia article on Klondike notes, nobody has found evidence for it, so treat that story as a nice guess rather than a fact.

What is well documented is how the game became a household name. Microsoft Solitaire arrived with Windows 3.0 in 1990, and having Klondike sitting on millions of office and home computers did a great deal for its popularity. In Britain it is often called simply "patience", which suits it rather well.

The words you will hear

Card players use a small vocabulary for the parts of the table. Once you know these, every rule below reads easily.

How Klondike is set out

One standard pack of 52 cards is used. The first column gets one card, the second two, and so on up to seven cards in the last column. Only the bottom card of each column lies face up; the rest wait face down. That uses 28 cards. The remaining 24 go face down into the stock.

The full rules, as played on this site

Your aim

Move all 52 cards onto the four foundations, one suit per foundation, in order: Ace, 2, 3 and so on up to King.

Moving cards around the tableau

• A card may go onto a card one rank higher of the opposite colour. A red 6 sits on a black 7; a black Queen sits on a red King.
• You can move a whole face-up run at once, as long as the top card of the run fits where it lands.
• When a face-down card is left at the bottom of a column, it turns face up and joins the game.
• Only a King, or a run headed by a King, may go into an empty column.

Working through the stock pile

• Click the stock to turn one card onto the waste. The top waste card can go to the tableau or a foundation.
• When the stock is empty, turn the waste back over and go again. On this site there is no limit on how many times you can do that.

Building up the four foundations

• Aces start the foundations; each suit then climbs one card at a time.
• If you send a card up too early, you may bring one card back down from a foundation to the tableau when it helps.

A gentle walk through your first deal

Here is a calm way to approach a brand-new deal. It is the routine we would teach a friend over a cup of tea.

1. Look before you touch. Check the seven face-up cards. Any Aces? Play them to the foundations straight away. Any 2s that can follow?
2. Make the moves that uncover cards. A move that shifts a face-up card off a face-down one is almost always worth more than a move that does not. Start with the columns holding the most hidden cards, usually on the right.
3. Turn the stock only when the table is quiet. When there is nothing useful left in the tableau, turn a card from the stock and see whether it opens something up.
4. Keep an eye out for Kings. Before you empty a column, check that a King is ready to move into it. An empty column with no King to fill it is a space you cannot use.
5. Build foundations steadily, not greedily. Aces and 2s can go up at once. With higher cards, pause and ask whether you still need that card as a landing spot in the tableau.
6. Use Undo to explore. If a choice feels uncertain, try it; if it goes badly, step back and take the other path. That is not cheating. It is how people get good at the game.

What a typical deal looks like

Our team dealt 10,000 numbered games to see what an opening layout usually hands you. Three results are worth knowing before you start:

• In 88.0% of deals, at least one Ace starts hidden under face-down cards (1.6 of the four on average). Digging for them is part of nearly every game.
• In 8.6% of deals, none of the seven face-up cards can move at the start, so the first thing you do is turn the stock.
• A simple computer player that never looks ahead and never uses Undo still won 42.3% of those deals at Turn 1. A careful player with Undo should do better.

The full set of figures, including how many deals can be won with perfect play, lives on our Solitaire page.

Handy habits from seasoned players

Favour the long columns

The last column starts with six face-down cards, the one beside it five. Freeing those cards gives you more choices than anything else you can do early on.

Do not park cards you will want back

A red 5 on the foundation cannot hold a black 4 in the tableau. When both 4s of the other colour are already up, the 5 is safe to send; until then, think twice.

Klondike on solitaire-free.nz

This version is free, needs no download, no sign-up and no email address, and runs in any modern browser on a computer, tablet or phone. The cards are large and easy to read, and there is a zoom control if you would like them bigger still. You can drag cards or simply tap a card and then its new home. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are there for everyone, and the game keeps track of your wins, time and moves. You can turn the sound off, play fullscreen and pick a table colour you like.

The game shows wins, time and moves rather than a points score, so there is no scoring system to learn. If you enjoy Klondike, try the two-pack version, Solitaire Double, or the no-stock cousin, Yukon Solitaire.

Where our numbers come from, one step at a time

The figures on this page come from a study the solitaire-free.nz team ran in September 2026. Klondike here is the same game, with the same rules, as on our Solitaire page, so both pages draw on one set of results.

1. We read the rules from the game's own code. Seven columns of 1 to 7 cards, a 24-card stock, unlimited redeals, alternating-colour building, whole runs may move, and only Kings go into empty columns.
2. We rebuilt the game as a program and checked over 2,000 games that it only ever made legal moves.
3. We dealt numbered games. Each of the 10,000 deals comes from a seed number, so anyone running the same program gets the same cards in the same order.
4. We chose a simple player. It sees only the cards you can see, follows a fixed list of priorities, and never undoes a move. That makes its win rate a floor: a thoughtful person should beat it.
5. We inspected every deal as well, counting hidden Aces and opening moves before any card was played.
6. We worked out the margin of error. The 42.3% has a 95% range of 41.3% to 43.3%: if we repeated the whole test many times, the result would land inside that range 95 times in 100.
7. We were honest about the limits. A simple player cannot tell you how many deals are winnable; that needs a solver, and those results are on the Solitaire page.

The nuts and bolts

The simulation is written in Python 3.11 using only the standard library. The game logic lives in a module called klondike.py, and a shared runner shares the deals out across the processor cores of one computer using Python's multiprocessing, so thousands of games finish in seconds. Every deal is shuffled from its seed number, which is what makes the test repeatable. The 95% ranges are Wilson score intervals, a standard way of putting error bars on a percentage.

We used an AI assistant, Claude by Anthropic, to help write and review the simulation code and to draft this page. The AI did not make up any figures: each one comes from running the code, and the team checked the results against published research before putting them here.

By Admin, solitaire-free.nz. Study date: September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Are Klondike and "Solitaire" one and the same?

For most people, yes. When someone says solitaire or patience without naming a game, they almost always mean Klondike. Strictly speaking, solitaire is the whole family of one-player card games, and Klondike is its best-known member.

Is the name linked to the gold rush?

Nobody knows for certain. The gold-rush explanation is popular, but no evidence has been found to back it up.

Can I go through the stock as many times as I like?

Yes. On this site you can turn the waste back into the stock as often as you need.

Does the game keep a points total?

The game tracks wins, time and moves instead of points, so you can try to finish tidier or quicker than last time.

Where can I try something a little different?

Have a look at FreeCell for a game with every card showing, or browse the full list on our games page. There are more tips on the blog.