Clear Solitaire

Daily Challenge

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Daily Challenge

Daily Solitaire Challenge — One Deal, Everyone, Every Day

The Daily Challenge is a single solitaire deal that everyone on Clear Solitaire plays on the same calendar day. The deal is generated from the date itself, verified as winnable by a solver before it is published, and replaced at midnight Eastern Time. Finish it and you keep a streak; share a spoiler-free result line if you want to compare with someone. No account, no download.

How the daily deal is made

The deal is not picked by hand and it is not random-per-visitor. It is derived from the date.

Every day has a seed — the calendar date written as YYYY-MM-DD in the America/New_York time zone. That seed goes into a deterministic shuffle, which means the same seed always produces the identical 52-card layout on every device, in every browser, forever. Your phone and your laptop deal the same game. So does everyone else’s.

Before a day’s deal is published, a solver plays it to completion in the exact mode the challenge uses. If no winning line exists, that day’s seed is adjusted until one does. You are never handed a dead deal on a day that counts.

When the day changes

The daily rolls over at midnight in America/New_York — Eastern Time — and that boundary shifts with US daylight saving, as Eastern Time itself does.

Roughly what that means elsewhere, when Eastern is on daylight time:

We use one fixed time zone rather than each player’s local midnight for a simple reason: if the day rolled over locally, two people in different time zones would be playing different deals while both looking at the same date, and a shared result would mean nothing. One zone, one deal, one day.

The page shows the current challenge date and a countdown to the next one, so you never have to work out the conversion yourself.

Streaks

Your streak is the number of consecutive challenge days on which you completed the daily deal. Finish today’s and it goes up by one. Skip a day and it resets to one the next time you finish.

A few honest details:

Sharing a result

When you finish, you get a short result line you can copy: the challenge date, your time and move count, and nothing that gives the deal away. No card names, no move list, no “I got the Ace of spades on turn three”. Someone who hasn’t played yet can read it without having the puzzle spoiled.

The daily’s URL is stable, so sending someone the link sends them to today’s deal — not to a copy of your finished game.

Past challenges are still playable. Every deal on this site can be reached by seed: add ?seed= and the date to the game URL and you get that day’s exact layout back. Replaying an old day is a fine way to practise, though it does not affect your streak.

The rules you are playing by

The daily uses standard rules with no surprises, so that a shared time or move count means the same thing for everyone:

The timer starts on your first move, not on page load, so reading this page costs you nothing.

Strategy for a deal that only comes once

Because you get one deal a day and it is guaranteed solvable, the daily rewards a slightly different approach from casual play.

Survey before you touch anything. Look at all seven face-up cards and the four foundations before your first move. Note which columns are long — column 7 has six hidden cards, column 6 has five — because that is where the game will be decided. A ten-second survey costs nothing; the timer hasn’t started.

Aces and 2s go home immediately. Almost nothing else does. A 6 on the foundation cannot catch the opposite-colour 5. Keep mid-rank cards in the tableau as landing spots and send them up only when both opposite-colour cards one rank below are accounted for.

Prefer the move that flips a hidden card, and where you have a choice, flip in the column that has the most cards still face down.

Know your King before you empty a column. An empty column with no King ready for it is a wasted resource, and clearing one at the wrong moment is the most common way a promising daily collapses. Check the colour too: placing a black King when both your loose Queens are black gets you nothing.

Use undo as a search, not a rescue. When a line dries up, don’t restart — go back to the last point where you had a genuine choice and take the other branch. The deal is verified winnable, so a working line is definitely in there.

Chase your streak, not your time. A completed daily at a leisurely pace keeps the streak. A fast loss does not.

Playing the daily here

The daily uses the same board as every other game on this site, which means the same three card sizes — Standard, Large (the default) and Large Print — with high-contrast ranks and pips, and card faces that stay near-white in dark mode so red and black remain clearly distinct.

The whole challenge is playable from the keyboard: arrow keys to move between cards and piles, Enter or Space to pick up and put down, Escape to cancel, and D draw, U undo, R redo, H hint, A finish. Every card and pile is a labelled control, and moves are announced for screen readers as they happen.

Nothing sits over the cards: no pop-up between you and today’s deal, no video to sit through, no account, nothing to install.

Frequently asked questions

Are all daily challenges winnable?

Yes. Every Daily Challenge deal is run through a solver before it is published, in the exact game mode and rule set the challenge is played under, and it is only published once the solver has found a complete winning line from the opening layout to all 52 cards on the foundations. If a day’s seed produces a deal with no solution, that deal never goes out.

What that guarantee does not promise is that the day will be easy. Difficulty across verified deals varies enormously — some resolve in a few minutes of obvious moves, others have a single narrow path through a bottleneck and will beat most of the people who try them. We don’t smooth the difficulty out, because a challenge that is the same every day isn’t much of a challenge. There is also a real limit worth being straight about: the solver can see the face-down cards and you cannot, so a proven winning line may depend on information you don’t have at the moment you have to choose. That is precisely what unlimited undo is for.

How to solve solitaire daily challenge?

Treat it as a puzzle with a known answer rather than a hand of cards. In order:

  1. Survey first. Read all seven face-up cards and note which columns hold the most hidden cards. The timer starts on your first move, so this is free.
  2. Send Aces and 2s up straight away, and hold everything else back. Cards on the foundations can’t catch opposite-colour cards in the tableau, and premature foundation moves are the most common cause of a stuck daily.
  3. Prioritise flipping face-down cards, digging into the longest column when you have a choice of equally good moves.
  4. Plan the empty column before you make it. Know which King goes in, and check that King’s colour works with the Queens you can actually reach.
  5. When you stall, undo — don’t restart. Step back to the last real decision point and take the other branch. Since the deal is solver-verified, a line exists; finding it is the whole game.
  6. Use H for a nudge, not a solution. The hint suggests one reasonable move, favouring Aces and 2s home, then flips, then playing the waste.

If a day genuinely defeats you, the streak resets but the deal stays reachable by its seed. Come back to it tomorrow with fresh eyes; the layout will be identical.

You won

Nicely done.

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