Solitaire

About Solitaire

Solitaire, also called Patience, is the most played card game in the world, and the version almost everyone means when they say the word is Klondike. It is a single-player game built around one satisfying goal: take a shuffled deck of fifty-two cards and, by moving them according to a few simple rules, sort all of them into four ordered piles. Klondike became a household name after it was bundled with early versions of Microsoft Windows, where it quietly taught a whole generation how to use a mouse. Its appeal has never faded, because every deal is a fresh little puzzle: some fall apart in a minute, others take real thought, and winning always feels earned.

This is PlayZone's own build of Klondike Solitaire, made in-house and running entirely in your browser with no download, no account, and nothing to install. It deals from a properly shuffled fifty-two-card deck, tracks your move count and a live timer, and saves your best completion time to your browser so you have a personal record to beat. It is built for touch and mouse alike: tap a card to pick it up and tap where you want to drop it, or double-tap a card to send it straight to its foundation. Draw one card at a time from the stock, and recycle the pile as often as you need.

How to Play Klondike Solitaire

The table is laid out in three areas. Across the top left sit the stock (the face-down draw pile) and the waste (where drawn cards turn face up). Across the top right are the four foundations, the piles you are trying to build. Below everything are the seven tableau columns, dealt with one card in the first column, two in the second, and so on up to seven in the last, with only the bottom card of each column face up to start.

Your goal is to fill all four foundations. Each foundation is built up by suit, starting with an Ace, then the 2, 3, 4, and so on through to the King. Get every card of all four suits onto the foundations and you have won. To free up the cards you need, you rearrange the tableau columns. In the tableau you build downward in alternating colours: a red 6 can go on a black 7, a black 9 on a red 10, and so on. You can move a single face-up card or a whole valid run of them together. Only a King (or a run led by a King) may be placed onto an empty column. When you move the last face-up card off a column and reveal a face-down card beneath, that card flips up automatically and becomes available.

When you run out of moves on the table, draw from the stock: it turns the next card face up onto the waste, where the top card is always playable onto a foundation or a tableau column. When the stock is empty, click it once to recycle the waste back into a fresh stock and go through it again. In this version there is no limit on how many times you may recycle, so a deal is never lost just because you have been through the deck once.

Strategy: How to Win More Deals

Klondike rewards patience and planning far more than luck. A few habits separate players who win occasionally from players who win most of their games:

1. Expose face-down cards first. Your biggest goal early on is turning hidden cards face up, especially in the tallest columns. Every face-down card you flip gives you new options. When you have a choice of moves, prefer the one that reveals a hidden card.
2. Do not rush every Ace and 2 to the foundation. It is tempting to send cards up as soon as they fit, but low cards on the foundation can no longer help you build in the tableau. Play Aces and 2s up promptly, but hold slightly higher cards back if they are still useful for placing alternating-colour runs.
3. Work to empty a column. An empty tableau column is the most valuable real estate on the board, because it can hold a King and the run beneath it, unlocking cards elsewhere. Aim to clear a short column when you can, and try to have a King ready to fill it.
4. Think before you recycle the stock. Before running through the deck again, make sure you have made every useful move already on the table. Each pass through the stock is a chance to plan which waste cards you actually want and in what order.
5. Prioritise the longest hidden pile. When two moves are equally good, favour the one that chips away at the column with the most face-down cards. Those buried cards are the ones most likely to be blocking your win.
6. Colour matters when placing Kings. If you have a choice of which King to move into an empty column, pick the one whose colour lets the cards you most need to place sit on it next.

Not every deal can be won even with perfect play, but a large majority of draw-one Klondike games are winnable if you play carefully, so a loss is usually a sign there was a better line rather than an impossible deal. Slow down, read the whole board before touching a card, and your win rate climbs quickly.

A Short History of Solitaire

Patience games appeared in Europe in the late eighteenth century and were popular parlour entertainment throughout the nineteenth, with Klondike named after the Canadian gold-rush region. For most of the twentieth century solitaire meant a real deck of cards on a real table. That changed in 1990, when Microsoft included a digital Klondike with Windows 3.0, partly to make people comfortable with dragging and dropping using a mouse. It became one of the most-used pieces of software ever written, played during countless coffee breaks, and cemented Klondike as the solitaire in most people's minds. The browser era carried it forward: today you can deal a fresh game instantly on any device without installing a thing.

Further Reading

• The Best Free Browser Games to Play in 2026 Where a good game of Solitaire fits among the year's best puzzles.
• Work Break Games: 15 Best Quick Games for 5-Minute Breaks Why a single hand of Solitaire is a near-perfect break.
• Do Casual Browser Games Actually Train Your Brain? The honest research on planning and patience games.

If you like the calm, methodical thinking Solitaire asks for, you will probably also enjoy Sudoku for pure logic and 2048 for a quick planning puzzle.