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Find answers to the most common questions about Klondike Solitaire, from basic rules to advanced strategy and scoring.
"Solitaire" is a broad category of single-player card games, also known as "Patience" in British English. Klondike is the specific solitaire variant that most people mean when they say "Solitaire." It became the default association largely due to its inclusion in Microsoft Windows starting in 1990. Other solitaire variants include Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid, and many more.
No. Blake and Gent (2019) ran the Solvitaire solver over random deals with every hidden card known in advance and found 81.945 percent of Draw 3 deals solvable and 90.480 percent of Draw 1 deals, both with unlimited redeals. So roughly one Draw 3 deal in five cannot be won no matter how well you play. Both figures are ceilings that assume you can see the face-down cards; a player who cannot sees far fewer wins.
In Draw 1 (also called "Turn 1"), you flip one card at a time from the stock pile to the waste pile. Every card becomes accessible during each pass through the deck. In Draw 3 (also called "Turn 3"), three cards are flipped at once, and only the topmost card is playable. This makes Draw 3 significantly more challenging because you can only access every third card without playing the ones above it first.
Only a King or a sequence of cards beginning with a King can be moved into an empty tableau column. This is a standard Klondike rule. Some variants allow any card to fill an empty column, but this is not traditional Klondike.
Scoring varies by implementation, but the classic Microsoft Solitaire scoring system works as follows:
In timed mode, points are also deducted based on the elapsed time, encouraging faster play.
After dealing the seven tableau columns (which uses 28 cards), there are 24 cards remaining in the stock pile. The total is always 52: 28 in the tableau plus 24 in the stock.
In many digital implementations, yes — you can move the top card of a foundation pile back to the tableau if it fits a valid sequence. This can be a useful strategy when you need a card to bridge a gap in the tableau. However, some rule sets and competitive formats do not allow this move. In scored games, moving a card from the foundation to the tableau typically incurs a penalty.
Nobody has published a reliable figure for human play, so we do not quote one. What is measured is the ceiling: with every hidden card known in advance, Blake and Gent found 81.945 percent of Draw 3 deals and 90.480 percent of Draw 1 deals solvable. Real play falls well below that, because 21 of the 28 tableau cards start face-down and one wrong guess can strand a deal that was winnable.
The game is named after the Klondike region in Canada's Yukon Territory, which was famous for the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1899. The card game was reportedly popular among prospectors in the region. The connection between the game and the gold rush remains somewhat anecdotal, but the name has been associated with this solitaire variant since the late 19th century. Learn more on our history page.
When you have drawn through the entire stock pile, you can flip the waste pile over to reconstitute the stock. The cards are not reshuffled; they return in the same order. In standard Klondike, you can redeal the stock an unlimited number of times. Some variants limit the number of redeals to one or two passes through the deck, which increases the difficulty significantly.
There is no reliable early indicator that a game is unwinnable. Even deals that look difficult at the start can sometimes be solved. However, if you cycle through the entire stock multiple times without making any progress — no new cards can be played and no tableau moves are available — the game is almost certainly stuck. At that point, starting a new game is your best option.