How to Play
This is classic Klondike Solitaire, built for tapping instead of dragging. Seven tableau columns are dealt from left to right, one card in the first and seven in the last, with only the bottom card of each column face up. That leaves 21 face-down cards in the tableau, 7 face-up ones, and the remaining 24 cards sitting in the stock. Tap a card to select it — it gets a highlighted border and lifts slightly — then tap where you want it to go. Tap it again to deselect.
In the tableau you may stack a card onto another if it is one rank lower and the opposite color, for example a black 6 onto a red 7. A whole run of cards moves together as long as that run itself alternates color and counts down correctly. Only a King, or a run beginning with one, may be placed into an empty column. Above the tableau, the four foundations each build one suit upward from Ace to King; select a card and tap the foundation, or simply double-tap the card, to send it there. Moving a face-up card off a tableau column automatically flips the card underneath.
Tap the stock to deal new cards into the waste beside it — one at a time in Draw 1, three at a time in Draw 3. Only the top card of the waste can be played. When the stock runs out, tap the empty space to recycle the waste back into a stock in the same order, with no limit on how many times you may go through the deck. You win by getting all 52 cards onto the foundations.
There is no move limit, no scoring penalty, and unlimited Undo, so experimenting costs you nothing but time on the clock. A Hint button surfaces legal moves you may have missed, and once every card in the tableau is face up, an Auto Finish button appears to play out the rest of the win for you. The clock starts on your first move, and your best clear time is saved separately for each draw mode.
Draw 1 and Draw 3 Are Almost Different Games
The draw setting looks like a minor toggle and is the largest single factor in whether a deal is winnable. Draw 1 is substantially easier than Draw 3, and the reason is worth understanding precisely, because it changes how you should play rather than just how often you win.
In Draw 1 every card in the stock passes across the top of the waste in turn. Over one full pass you get the chance to play all 24 stock cards, in order, and you may cycle as often as you like. Effectively the entire deck is available to you at all times; the only question is how many draws it takes to reach a particular card.
In Draw 3, three cards move to the waste at once and only the last one is playable. With 24 cards in the stock, a pass deals eight groups of three, and the cards you can actually reach are the third, sixth, ninth, and so on. The other two-thirds of the stock are physically present and completely untouchable — you can see them, but you cannot select them.
What makes Draw 3 winnable at all is that the grouping shifts. If you play a card off the waste, the stock has one fewer card, so the next pass divides differently and a new set of cards lands on top. This is the central skill of Draw 3: every card you play from the waste changes which cards will be reachable on the next cycle. Good Draw 3 players think of a waste play not only as a move but as a phase shift, and will sometimes make a mediocre-looking play purely to change which cards come up next time around.
The flip side is the way Draw 3 games die. If you complete a full pass through the stock without playing a single card from the waste, and no tableau move has opened up anything new, the next pass will present you with exactly the same cards in exactly the same positions, forever. The stock still cycles, buttons still respond, and nothing will ever change. Recognizing that state early saves you a lot of pointless clicking: if a full lap produced nothing, the deal is finished.
The practical adjustment is that Draw 3 rewards patience and planning several moves out, while Draw 1 rewards efficiency. In Draw 1 you can generally count on getting any stock card you need eventually, so your decisions are about tableau structure. In Draw 3 you must plan around access, and a card you can reach today may be unreachable for the rest of the game if you spend the wrong move.
The Foundation Is a One-Way Door
The most common way to lose a solvable deal is to send cards to the foundations as soon as they become eligible. It feels like progress — the piles grow, the win looks closer — and it is frequently a mistake.
In this game a card that goes up cannot come back down. There is no move from a foundation to the tableau; the only way to retrieve a card is Undo. So every foundation play is a permanent decision to remove a card from the working area, and the working area is where the game is actually played.
The cost is concrete. Low and middling cards in the tableau are the bases that other cards stack onto. Send a red 7 to its foundation and every black 6 in the deck has just lost a home. If both black 6s then end up stranded, the runs they would have anchored never form, the columns they would have unblocked stay blocked, and the deal fails several minutes later for a reason you created early.
There is a clean test for whether a card is safe to send up. Before playing a card of rank N, ask whether any opposite-color card of rank N-1 could still need it as a base. If both opposite-color foundations have already reached N-1 or higher, then no such card will ever require your card in the tableau, and the play is free. If either of them lags behind, hold the card unless you have a specific reason not to.
Aces and twos are the obvious exceptions — nothing stacks on an Ace, and a two only ever hosts an Ace, which belongs on the foundation anyway. Send those up on sight. Everything from three upward deserves a moment of thought, and by the time you reach the middle ranks that moment is often the whole game.
Dig the Deepest Column First
The 21 face-down cards are the real content of a Klondike deal. Everything already visible is known; every hidden card is both a resource you do not have yet and a piece of information you are missing. Turning them over is the engine of the game, and the order in which you do it matters.
As a default, prioritize moves that flip a face-down card over moves that do not, and among those, work on the columns with the most cards still hidden. The rightmost columns start with five and six face-down cards, and those are the hardest to unearth: each one requires clearing everything above it, which takes more moves and more places to put things than you will have later. Early in the deal you have empty foundations, an untouched stock, and plenty of stacking room. That flexibility is at its maximum on move one and declines steadily.
Digging the shallow columns first feels productive because the cards flip quickly, but it spends your maneuvering room on the cheap targets and leaves you facing a six-card stack with nowhere to unload it. Deals lost this way tend to end with one enormous column that everybody could see coming.
One qualification: a flip is only worth what it opens. Moving a card to expose another face-down card is good; moving a card to expose a card you already know cannot help, in a column you have no plan for, is just churn. And when two moves each flip a card, prefer the one that also improves your structure — the one that consolidates a run, or that empties a column, rather than the one that scatters cards across three piles.
Empty Columns Are Your Most Valuable Asset
An empty column is the most flexible thing you can own in Klondike. It can accept a King and the entire run built beneath it, which unlocks whole sequences of moves that were previously impossible. Because of that, the decision of what to put in one is often the decision that settles the deal.
The instinct is to fill an empty column with the first available King. Frequently that is wrong. Ask first what the King is coming from. A King sitting at the base of a column with face-down cards beneath it is worth moving, because relocating it flips those cards and may empty that column in turn. A King already at the bottom of its own column with nothing hidden underneath gains you nothing by moving — you have simply traded a flexible empty space for a fixed one and gotten no new information for it.
Ask second whether the King can be built on. A King needs an opposite-color Queen to start a run, and a King with no reachable Queen is an eleven-rank dead end occupying your best square of real estate. If you have two Kings available and only one empty column, prefer the one whose Queen you can actually see.
Holding an empty column open is a legitimate strategy in its own right, because it doubles as temporary parking: you can shift a run there to break up a blockage and then move it back somewhere better. Keeping one column empty and uncommitted, for as long as you can afford to, is often stronger than filling it immediately.
Reading the Stock Before You Need It
Because drawing costs nothing here — no score penalty, unlimited recycles — it is entirely legitimate to cycle the stock early just to see what is in it. In Draw 1 one full pass shows you all 24 cards. Knowing that the black Queen you need is in the stock rather than buried under six face-down cards changes which column you should attack, and knowing that a key low card is not in the stock tells you it must be somewhere in the tableau.
Do this before you commit to a plan rather than after it fails. The only cost is the clock, and a plan built on the actual location of the cards beats a faster plan built on hope. In Draw 3 the same scouting pass is worth even more, because you also learn which cards will and will not be reachable in the current phase — information you cannot get any other way.
Not Every Deal Can Be Won
Klondike is not guaranteed solvable. A meaningful fraction of shuffles are impossible from the start, no matter how well they are played — a needed card can be buried beneath cards that themselves require it, and no ordering of moves escapes the loop. Exact solvability figures depend heavily on the rule variant and on whether the solver is allowed to see the face-down cards, so treat any single number you read about it with caution.
What matters practically is the distinction between a lost deal and a misplayed one. If you reach a position with no legal moves left and a full stock cycle produces nothing new, the deal is over and that is not a verdict on your play. If instead you are stuck holding a fat foundation and a column of face-down cards you never touched, that one was on you — and Undo is unlimited, so you can walk it back and find out which of the two it was. Doing that occasionally is the fastest way to improve.
Using the Hint Button Without Letting It Play for You
The Hint button finds every legal move available in the current position and offers them in a fixed order: first moves that flip a face-down card, then moves to the foundations, then waste-to-tableau plays, then remaining tableau shuffles. Cycling through it is a reliable way to confirm you have not simply overlooked something.
Bear in mind that it is a move finder, not a strategist. It will happily offer a foundation play that a strong player would decline, because it does not know which low cards you still need as bases. Use it to answer "what can I do?" and keep answering "what should I do?" yourself. The ordering is still informative in one respect worth absorbing: the move that flips a hidden card really does come first most of the time.
Tips
- Play Draw 1 to win and Draw 3 to be challenged. Draw 3 is not a faster game — it is a harder one that demands planning around which cards you can reach.
- In Draw 3, treat every waste play as a phase shift. It changes which cards surface on the next pass, and that is often its real value.
- If a full Draw 3 cycle passes with nothing played and nothing changed, the deal is dead. Start a new one.
- Do not send a card of rank N to a foundation while an opposite-color N-1 might still need it as a base. Aces and twos are always safe.
- Prefer moves that flip face-down cards, and attack the deep right-hand columns while you still have room to work.
- Do not fill an empty column with a King that was already sitting on nothing — you gain no information and lose your best resource.
- Scout the stock early. Drawing is free, and knowing where a key card sits changes which column is worth opening.
- Undo is unlimited. When a deal stalls, roll back to the branch point and try the other order instead of dealing a new game.
About This Solitaire
This is a free online version of the classic Klondike Solitaire card game, built entirely around tap controls rather than drag-and-drop, so it is just as comfortable on a phone as it is with a mouse. It runs in the browser with no download and no account. Cards are drawn on canvas rather than as image sprites, which keeps the corner ranks and suits crisp and readable even at the small card sizes needed to fit all seven columns on a narrow screen.
Your fastest clear time is saved locally in your browser, tracked separately for Draw 1 and Draw 3 since the two modes are so different in difficulty. There is no move limit and no scoring penalty for thinking things through — only your best clear time is kept, so you can play a careful, exploratory game today and come back to chase a faster time once you know how the deck behaves.