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These answers cover the rules that trip up new Yukon players and the tactics that decide close games. The full Yukon Solitaire rules run through setup and play in order; this page handles the edges around them, from partial group moves to reading a board that is already lost.
Pick up any face-up card, however deeply it sits in its column, and every card above it travels with it as one block. Only two cards are tested: the one you lifted and the one it lands on. The lifted card must be one rank lower and the opposite color.
No. Every card sitting above the one you select comes along, in the order it already holds, and you cannot leave any of it behind or rearrange it. Digging out a card deep in a column means finding a legal home for the whole pile riding on top of it.
No. The group move is a tableau privilege and never applies to the foundations, which take one card at a time from the exposed end of a column. An Ace buried under six cards cannot jump to a foundation. Shift all six onto other columns first, then send it up.
Not in our game. Once a card reaches a foundation it stays there, so a card banked early is gone for the rest of the deal. Versions differ on this point: some let you pull a card back into the tableau. Check before you rely on a rescue.
21 of the 52. Column 1 hides nothing, and every column after it hides one more than the column to its left, running 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 across the seven columns. The other 31 cards are face up from the first move.
The board becomes fully open and every remaining decision is pure planning. A face-down card flips the moment nothing covers it, at no cost in moves, so the flip is free. An open board is not a won board: cards already banked cannot return, and a rank trapped under a long pile stays trapped.
Only a King, or a group whose bottom card is a King. No other rank may start a column. Because any face-up card moves with the pile on top of it, a King buried under unrelated cards still qualifies and brings that whole pile into the space with it.
No, and it has no waste pile or redeal either. All 52 cards go to the tableau at the deal, against 28 in Klondike, which holds 24 back. The only new information that ever enters a Yukon game is a face-down card turning over.
None mechanically. Yukon tests rank and color at the join and nowhere else, so a tidy descending run inside a column earns no privilege that a scrambled pile lacks. Grooming sequences is the most common habit players carry over from Klondike, and it usually buries the card they were trying to reach.
Aces yes, most other ranks no. Nothing can be placed on an Ace, so an Ace does no work in the tableau, and twos and threes are close to safe. From the 4 upward each card is a landing pad, and every tableau card has only two possible destinations: the two opposite-color cards one rank above it.
Refuse any move that does not turn one. If a flipping move exists, take it over a tidier move that reveals nothing. Work columns 6 and 7 first: they hide 5 and 6 cards between them, more than half the hidden information in the deal, so digging there buys the most.
Work backwards. Pick a column, ask what its top card needs in order to leave, then ask the same of that card, and keep going until you reach a card you can move now. Play the chain in reverse. If no column can be dug, look for a move that frees an Ace.
The clearest test is the two-destination arithmetic: when both opposite-color cards of a rank are banked or unreachable and a card one rank lower still sits on a face-down card, that card can never be flipped. Two or three columns where no move reveals anything is the other warning. Four buried Kings and no empty column is a third.
No, though one rule is all that separates them. Russian Solitaire builds the tableau down in suit rather than in alternating color, which cuts every card's landing places from two to one. Measured player results put it near 3 percent.
Scorpion borrows the group move and changes almost everything else. It deals 49 cards into seven columns of seven, holds three back for when you stall, hides 12 rather than 21, and builds down in suit. Its King-to-Ace runs are assembled in the tableau instead of on foundations.
Two events score in our game. Turning a face-down card is worth 5 points and moving a card to a foundation is worth 10, and nothing else adds to the total. A won deal turns all 21 hidden cards and sends all 52 up, so every win scores exactly 625.
A solver sees all 52 cards and never misplays. Ours found a winning line in 145 of 200 random deals, a floor of 72.5 percent. Measured human play on large public solitaire sites sits near 13 to 14 percent. The difficulty is in the finding, not the dealing.
Our Yukon variants guide covers Russian Solitaire, Alaska, Moosehide and the multi-deck games in detail. Scorpion and Klondike are the two games Yukon is most often compared with.
Deal a Yukon hand and try a group move with real cards. All 52 are on the table from the first move.
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