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Answers to the most common questions about Golf solitaire rules, scoring, strategy, and gameplay. Whether you are learning the game for the first time or looking to shave strokes off your course score, you will find the answer here.
Golf solitaire is a single-player card game where 35 cards are dealt face-up in seven columns of five. You remove cards from the bottom of each column that are one rank higher or lower than the top waste pile card, regardless of suit. The other 17 cards form the stock, whose top card is turned up to start the waste pile, leaving 16 draws. Every card you fail to clear counts as a stroke, and lower is better, just as in golf.
In standard Golf solitaire, Kings are the highest rank and nothing wraps above them. When a King lands on the waste pile, no tableau card can be played on it because there is no card one rank higher than a King. You must draw from the stock to continue. Some variants introduce Ace-King wrapping to eliminate this dead end, but the classic rules do not allow it.
Yes. Aces and 2s are adjacent ranks, so you can play a 2 on an Ace and an Ace on a 2. The dead-end restriction applies only to Kings in the standard game. Aces behave as the lowest rank and connect downward from 2, but do not wrap upward to King.
Each card left in the tableau when a hole ends costs one stroke. Clearing the tableau flips the sign: the hole scores minus one for every card still unused in the stock, so clearing with ten cards to draw is minus 10. Our game plays nine holes and adds them together. Par is 45, and a total of zero or lower wins the round.
Morehead and Mott-Smith put the win rate for the traditional game at about 5 percent, and Solitaire Laboratory still quotes that figure. It is a human rate rather than a solver bound, and it applies to exactly the rules we use: nothing may be played on a King, and there is no Ace-King wrap. No published solver study covers this version, so we quote no solvability number. The 16 draws are the other constraint.
Both games share the core mechanic of removing cards one rank higher or lower than the waste pile card. The key differences are layout and scoring. Golf uses seven flat columns of five face-up cards (35 total) with 17 in stock, while Tri-Peaks uses 28 cards in three overlapping pyramids with 24 in stock. Tri-Peaks uses streak-based scoring; Golf counts remaining tableau cards as strokes. Tri-Peaks also allows Ace-King wrapping by default, whereas standard Golf does not.
Not always. Because you can see every card in the tableau, look ahead before committing. Sometimes removing a card exposes a King that will block future chains, or choosing one branch locks you out of a longer sequence on another column. Evaluate which removal opens the most follow-up options before acting.
Nine holes, mirroring the front nine in golf. That is what our game deals, and the nine hole scores are added together for the final total. Par is 45. Some players prefer eighteen holes for a full course, in which case you keep adding strokes the same way.
No. Our Golf has no undo, and neither does casual paper play: once a card goes to the waste pile it stays there. That is why the whole tableau is dealt face-up. Read the columns before you commit to a removal, because a wrong branch cannot be walked back.
When all five cards in a column have been removed, that column is simply empty for the rest of the round. Empty columns do not refill and have no special effect. Clearing columns early is generally beneficial because it reduces the number of potential dead ends and focuses your remaining options into fewer, more manageable columns.
Ready to hit the course? Start a round and see how few strokes you can score.
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