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Solitaire
Cards · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
Seven columns, four empty foundations, and a stock you turn through. Build down in alternating colours, build up in suits from the aces. It is the most played card game ever written, and a fair number of deals simply cannot be won.
Where it comes from
Patience games — one player, a pack of cards, and a layout to resolve — show up in Europe around the end of the eighteenth century, in Scandinavia and Germany first. This particular one is named after the Klondike gold rush of the eighteen-nineties, and the usual story is that prospectors played it, though as with most games the name may simply have been good marketing.
Its real fame is thirty-five years old. When Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 in 1990, it included a version of Klondike written by an intern, Wes Cherry, with cards drawn by Susan Kare. It was not there to be fun. Windows was asking people to do something they had never done before — pick an object up with a mouse, drag it somewhere and drop it — and a card game is a painless way to practise that several hundred times without noticing.
It worked better than anyone intended: Solitaire became one of the most used programs on Windows, full stop. Cherry was an intern and received no royalties. His prototype had a panic button that replaced the game with a fake spreadsheet; he was asked to take it out.
And one honest thing about the game itself: not every deal is winnable. Depending on the rules you use, a substantial share of deals cannot be solved however well you play. It is a patience, not a puzzle, and losing is sometimes simply the deal.
How to play
| The layout | Seven columns, one to seven cards, only the last of each face up. |
|---|---|
| Building down | Onto a column, in descending order and alternating colours: a red six onto a black seven. |
| Building up | Onto a foundation, ace first, then upwards in the same suit. |
| Empty columns | Only a king may start one. |
| The stock | Turn cards from it when you run out of moves. |
| Winning | All fifty-two cards on the four foundations. |
Our version
Klondike with cards you can read on a phone, and moves you can take back — because a patience you cannot undo is a patience where one mis-click ends an hour.
Three things that help
Turn over face-down cards before anything else. Every hidden card is a card you cannot plan around. A move that reveals one beats a move that tidies the table.
Do not send cards to the foundations too early. A two you have banked is a two you can no longer put a black ace on. Keep low cards in play while the columns still need them.
Empty a column only if you have a king ready. An empty column with no king to fill it is dead space, and it is usually the reason a promising game stalls.