Klondike Solitaire — Free Online, No Download
Klondike Solitaire is the single-player card game most people mean when they say “Solitaire”: you deal 28 of a standard 52-card deck into seven columns, then try to build four foundation piles from Ace up to King, one per suit, by stacking cards in the columns in descending order with alternating colours. Clear Solitaire deals it in your browser with large, high-contrast cards — free, no download, no account, and by default only deals that a solver has already proven can be won.
The layout, piece by piece
A Klondike board has four areas, and every rule in the game is about moving cards between them.
The tableau is the seven columns across the middle. Column 1 gets one card, column 2 gets two, and so on up to seven — 28 cards in all. Only the last card in each column starts face up; everything underneath is face down and hidden from you.
The stock is the 24 cards left over, sitting face down in the corner. It is your supply of new material.
The waste is where cards from the stock land face up. Only the top card of the waste is available to play.
The foundations are the four empty slots you are trying to fill. Each one belongs to a single suit and has to be built in strict order: Ace, 2, 3, and so on to King. Fill all four and you have won — all 52 cards home.
On this site each empty foundation shows the suit it is waiting for, so you never have to remember which slot is which, and screen readers announce it the same way.
How to play Klondike
Building in the tableau. Inside the columns you build downward and in alternating colours. A red 9 can go on a black 10. A black 4 can go on a red 5. Same colour never stacks, and you can never place a card on a lower rank.
Moving runs. Any face-up sequence that is already in correct order moves as a single unit. If you have a red 7 with a black 6 and a red 5 on it, all three travel together onto any black 8.
Uncovering. When you move the last face-up card off a column, the face-down card beneath it turns over. This is the engine of the whole game — almost everything you do is in service of flipping those 21 hidden cards.
Empty columns. An empty column can only be started by a King, or by a run whose top card is a King. Nothing else may be placed on bare felt.
The stock. Click the stock (or press D) to turn cards to the waste — one at a time in Draw 1, three at a time in Draw 3. When the stock runs out, the waste turns back over and you go through it again. Clear Solitaire allows unlimited passes through the stock, which is the standard most players expect and the assumption our solver uses when it checks a deal.
Foundations are not a one-way door on strategy, but they nearly are. You can pull a card back off a foundation here if you need it, but every card you send up is a card that can no longer catch an opposite-colour neighbour in the tableau. That tension is most of the skill in this game.
Draw 1 or Draw 3
The stock rule is the single biggest lever on difficulty, and it is worth understanding rather than just picking one.
In Draw 1, every card in the stock passes under your hand individually. Nothing is ever locked away; if a card exists, you can reach it on this pass. Deals are far more forgiving, and the game rewards planning over luck.
In Draw 3, cards come over three at a time and only the top of the three is playable. That means roughly a third of the stock is immediately available on any given pass — but the phase shifts every time you actually take a card, which quietly re-shuffles which cards are reachable next time around. Draw 3 is the tournament-style version and where most of the game’s reputation for difficulty comes from.
Share of random deals our solver has proved winnable: 82.7% for Draw 1 and 51.1% for Draw 3. Both are floors rather than exact measurements — a deal the solver runs out of time on is counted as a miss, so the real figures are a little higher. Human win rates in ordinary play sit a good deal lower than both, because knowing a deal is solvable and finding the solution are different problems.
You can switch between them at any time in Settings. Because switching changes how the deal plays out, it re-deals the same seed, so we ask before throwing away a game in progress.
Strategy: what actually moves your win rate
Most Klondike advice is folklore. These five habits are the ones that hold up.
1. Face-down cards are the real opponent
When two moves look equally good, take the one that flips a hidden card — and when you can choose which column to dig into, dig into the one with the most cards still face down. Column 7 starts with six hidden cards and column 1 with none; the long columns are where games are lost.
2. Don’t send every card home
Aces and 2s should go up the moment you see them; they can never be useful in the tableau. Beyond that, hesitate. A red 6 on a foundation cannot catch a black 5, and a stranded black 5 can freeze a whole column. A good rule of thumb: keep a card in the tableau if the opposite-colour card one rank below it is still hidden or still in the stock.
3. Treat an empty column as a resource, not a prize
An empty column is the most powerful thing on the board — it is a parking space that lets you unstack a run and reorder it. But an empty column with no King in sight is dead weight, and emptying a column to place a King you didn’t need is how good positions collapse. Before you clear a column, know which King is going into it and what that King unlocks.
4. Colour-match your Kings
When you have a choice of two Kings for an empty column, look at your Queens. Placing a black King when both your available Queens are black wastes the column. This one decision decides a surprising number of Draw 3 games.
5. Play the waste before it recycles
In Draw 3 especially, a card you skip may not come back around in the same position. If a waste card is genuinely playable and does not cost you a better move, take it.
And one honest note about hints and undo
Undo is not cheating. On a deal that has been proven winnable, backing up two moves to try a different order is exactly how you learn the shape of the game. Press U freely. The hint key H suggests one reasonable move — it favours getting Aces and 2s home, then flipping hidden cards, then playing the waste — but it is a nudge, not a solution path.
Playing Klondike here
Everything on this site is aimed at one thing: making a long game of Klondike comfortable to sit with.
Cards default to Large, and there is a Large Print size beyond that with oversized ranks and suits for anyone who finds standard playing-card faces a strain. Card faces stay near-white even in dark mode, so the red and black pips keep their contrast instead of turning into grey-on-grey.
Winnable deals only is on by default. Every deal you are given has been run through a solver and proven to have at least one winning line, so a loss is a loss you can learn from. You can turn it off if you want genuinely random deals, including the unwinnable ones.
The whole game is playable from the keyboard: arrow keys move between cards and piles, Enter or Space picks up and puts down, Escape cancels, and D, U, R, H, N, A handle draw, undo, redo, hint, new game and finish. Every card and pile is a real labelled control, so screen readers announce moves as they happen.
Ads on this site are placed beside the board and never over it. No pop-ups, no video you have to watch to keep playing, no account, nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Draw 1 and Draw 3?
Draw 1 turns one card from the stock at a time, so every card in the stock is reachable on every pass. Draw 3 turns three cards at once and only the top one can be played, so roughly two-thirds of the stock is temporarily blocked at any moment — though the alignment shifts each time you take a card, which changes what is reachable on the next pass. Draw 3 is meaningfully harder: far fewer deals are winnable at all, and the ones that are usually require a longer, more exact sequence of moves. Draw 1 is the better choice for a relaxed game or for learning; Draw 3 is the classic competitive setting. Both are here, and switching takes one click in Settings.
Is every game of Solitaire winnable?
No. With a genuinely random shuffle, a meaningful share of Klondike deals cannot be won by anyone, no matter how well they play — the hidden cards can simply be arranged so that no legal sequence of moves reaches all four foundations. That is why Clear Solitaire turns on Winnable deals only by default: before a deal reaches you, a solver plays it out and confirms at least one winning line exists. Winnable is not the same as easy — some proven-solvable deals need a very specific order of moves and will beat you several times before they don’t — but it does mean that when you lose, the loss was yours to avoid.
What is the trick to beating Solitaire?
There is no single trick, but there is a priority order that beats casual play almost every time: get Aces and 2s to the foundations immediately; after that, prefer any move that turns over a face-down card; dig into the column with the most hidden cards; hold low and mid cards in the tableau rather than sending them home early, because they are the landing spots that let you keep unstacking; and only empty a column when you already know which King is going into it and why. Combine that with unlimited undo on a deal you know is solvable, and your win rate will climb faster than it will from any amount of shuffling for a “good” deal.