How to Win at Solitaire: A Klondike Strategy Guide

The most-played game you never learned properly

Klondike — the game almost everyone simply calls "Solitaire" — became one of the most-played video games in history largely by accident, bundled into Windows in 1990 to teach a generation how to use a mouse. Billions of games later, most people still play it the way they always have: on instinct, moving whatever can move, and blaming luck when they lose. Luck is real in Solitaire, but skill matters more than the casual player thinks. The gap between a careless win rate and a careful one is large, and it comes down to a few principles you can learn in ten minutes.

This guide covers the full rules and then the strategy that actually moves your win rate. You can follow along on our free Solitaire game, which runs in your browser with Draw 1 and Draw 3 modes, unlimited undo, a timer and an auto-finish — no download and no sign-up.

The board and the goal

Klondike uses a standard 52-card deck laid out in four areas. The tableau is the main playing field: seven columns holding 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 cards, where only the last card of each column starts face-up and the rest are hidden. The foundations are four empty piles at the top, one per suit, which you build up from Ace to King — filling all four is how you win. The stock is the remaining 24 cards you draw from, and the waste is where drawn cards land face-up, ready to play.

The objective is simple to state: move all 52 cards to the foundations, each suit stacked Ace through King. Everything else — the shuffling of cards around the tableau, the drawing from the stock — is just the means of freeing the right cards in the right order to get them home.

The rules of movement

Three rules govern every move:

• →Tableau building goes down and alternates colour. You place cards in descending rank with alternating colours — a red 6 on a black 7, a black 5 on the red 6, and so on. You can move a whole valid sequence at once.
• →Foundations build up by suit. Start each with its Ace, then add 2, 3, 4… of the same suit up to the King.
• →Empty columns take only a King. When you clear a column, only a King (or a run headed by a King) can move into the gap.

When you move the face-up card off a tableau pile, the face-down card beneath it flips over — that reveal is the engine of the whole game. You draw from the stock to the waste (one card at a time in Draw 1, three at a time in Draw 3), and when the stock runs out you recycle the waste back into it and go again. On our game you simply tap a card to select it and tap where it should go; a double-tap sends a card straight to its foundation.

Strategy 1: hunt face-down cards

If you remember one idea, make it this: your real enemy is the face-down cards, because they're hidden information. Every card you can't see is a move you can't plan. So when two moves look equally good, choose the one that flips over a face-down card — and prioritise flipping cards in your largest face-down piles, because those columns hold the most locked-up potential and take the most work to clear. A move that shuffles two face-up cards around without revealing anything new has, in a real sense, wasted a turn. Progress in Solitaire is measured less by cards reaching the foundation than by face-down cards turning face-up.

Strategy 2: don't rush every card to the foundation

It feels like progress to send cards up to the foundations, and beginners send everything up the moment they can. That's a trap. Once a card is on a foundation, it's very hard to get back, and mid-rank cards are often needed in the tableau as landing spots for the opposite colour. Promote a red 7 too early and you may have nowhere to park a black 6 that was about to free a face-down card.

The nuance: Aces and Twos should always go up — they're never useful sitting in the tableau. Beyond that, keep the foundations roughly balanced and hold higher cards in play until you're sure you don't need them as anchors. A good sanity check some players use: don't send a card to the foundation if a card of the opposite colour and one rank lower is still buried and might need it. When the endgame is clearly won, our Auto-finish button clears everything up for you in one click.

Strategy 3: manage columns and Kings

Empty columns are powerful — they're free space to manoeuvre — but they can only be filled by a King, so an empty column is useless if you have no King ready to occupy it. Plan ahead: as you work a column down, line up a King (ideally one that already has a sequence built beneath it) to move into the space the moment it opens. Prioritise emptying the columns that are close to clear, and be wary of exposing a King with a long tail of face-down cards you can't yet move.

Colour and rank planning matters too. Because tableau stacks alternate colours, think about which colour a given card needs beneath it before you commit. If you have a choice of where to place a black 6, put it on the red 7 that will most help you expose a face-down card or build a longer movable run. This kind of look-ahead is what separates a 30% win rate from a 60% one, and it's why the Undo button is a strategic tool, not a cheat — use it to explore a line, see where it dead-ends, and back out to try a better order.

Draw 1 vs Draw 3: choosing your challenge

The single biggest lever on difficulty is the draw mode. Draw 1 turns one stock card at a time, giving you access to every card in the deck and a relaxed, high-win-rate game — a large majority of Draw 1 deals are winnable with careful play, which makes it ideal for learning and for a low-stress session. Draw 3 turns three cards at once and lets you play only the top of the three, so many cards are temporarily out of reach and you have to plan around the rhythm of the deck.

Draw 3 has a lower solvable rate and demands a specific skill: counting. Because the cards come in groups of three, the position of a card you need within the stock determines when — or whether — you can reach it, and skilled players track this and time their draws so a needed card lands on top. If you're learning the strategy above, start on Draw 1 to internalise the principles, then switch to Draw 3 for the classic, tougher game. Our tool lets you flip between them with one tap.

Playing the opening: a worked sequence

The first thirty seconds of a game set up everything that follows, so it's worth seeing the thinking in action. When a fresh deal appears, resist touching anything and read the board top to bottom. First, scan the seven face-up cards at the bottom of each column for Aces and Twos — send them straight up to the foundations, because they do nothing useful in the tableau and every promotion frees a face-down card beneath them. Next, look for immediate tableau plays among those seven exposed cards: is there a red card that sits one rank below an exposed black card, or vice versa? Each such move flips another face-down card and is almost always worth making early.

Say your exposed cards include a black 7 in a long column and a red 6 sitting alone on a shorter one. Moving the red 6 onto the black 7 both builds a sequence and turns over the card that was hiding under the 6 — pure progress. If that newly revealed card is, say, a black 5, you can continue the chain if a red or... a black 5 needs a red 6, which you now have on the black 7, so the 5 goes on too, exposing yet another card. This cascading reveal is the satisfying heart of a good opening, and it's why the order of moves matters: had you drawn from the stock first, you might have missed the chain entirely.

Only once the free tableau moves are exhausted should you begin drawing from the stock, and even then with a plan: you're looking for cards that extend your existing sequences or unlock a stuck column, not just flipping hopefully. On our game the Undo button makes this exploratory — try drawing, see what becomes available, and if a line dead-ends, step back and sequence your earlier moves differently. Treating the opening as a deliberate puzzle rather than a reflex is the habit that most reliably lifts a win rate, whichever deal you're handed. One more opening principle worth internalising: when you have a choice of which column to attack first, favour the one with the most face-down cards, because clearing a seven-card column unlocks far more of the deck than emptying a short one, and an early empty column — ready for a King — is one of the strongest positions you can hold in the whole game.

Common mistakes and a quick word on odds

Playing the first available move. Pause and scan the whole board before touching anything — the obvious move is often not the best one.

Emptying a column with no King ready. A wasted empty column is a wasted resource. Line up the King first.

Over-promoting to foundations. Keep mid-rank cards in play as landing spots; send up Aces and Twos freely, higher cards cautiously.

Blaming luck for everything. Not every deal is winnable — some are genuinely impossible — but far more are lost to hasty play than to bad shuffles. When you're stuck, Undo and try a different order before you conclude the deal was dead. If you enjoy this kind of logical planning, you'll likely also like our Sudoku and Minesweeper, which reward the same patient, read-the-whole-board mindset that turns an average Solitaire player into a consistent winner.

Frequently Asked Questions