How to Play — Controls, Keyboard Shortcuts and Settings

Every game on Clear Solitaire can be played three ways: with a mouse, by touch, or entirely from the keyboard. This page covers all three, plus every setting on the site — card size including Large Print, dark mode, draw mode and winnable deals. Nothing here needs an account or a download.

Mouse and trackpad

Move a card: drag it to where you want it, or click it once to pick it up and click the destination to put it down. Click-and-click is usually steadier than dragging, especially with a trackpad, and it is the same number of actions.

Send a card home fast: double-click any face-up card and it goes to its foundation if it legally can. This is the shortcut you will use most.

Draw from the stock: click the face-down stock pile. When the stock is empty, clicking it turns the waste back over for another pass.

Move a run: grab the highest card of an ordered sequence and the whole sequence travels with it.

Cancel: click the picked-up card again, or press Escape.

Illegal moves simply don’t take — the card returns to where it was. Nothing on this site punishes a misclick.

Touch — phone and tablet

Tap to pick up, tap to place. Tap a card, then tap the pile you want it on. Dragging works too, but tap-tap is far more reliable on a small screen and much kinder if you play with a tremor or a stylus.

Double-tap sends a card to its foundation.

Tap the stock to draw.

Touch targets are the size of the card itself, so the larger card sizes are also the easier ones to hit accurately. If you find yourself missing cards, go up a size before you go looking for a settings fix.

Keyboard — the whole game, no mouse

Focus moves between cards and piles with Tab and the arrow keys. The arrow keys follow the board’s real geometry rather than a flat list: the top row sits on the same seven-column grid as the tableau, so ArrowUp from column 1 reaches the stock, from columns 2 and 3 the waste, and from columns 4 to 7 the matching foundation. ArrowDown brings you back.

Undo is unlimited and costs you nothing — no penalty, no scoring change, no effect on a daily streak. Auto-complete plays out a board that is already won but not yet cleared, one move at a time, so you can still undo card by card afterwards.

Single-letter shortcuts are ignored while a toolbar button or a dialog control has focus, so pressing U on the “New game” button activates that button rather than silently undoing a move. From a card, the letters always work.

Every card and pile is a real labelled control. A screen reader announces “Seven of hearts, face up, column 3, card 2 of 5”, and a live region reads out each move, undo, hint and the win as it happens. Focus rings are 3 px and high contrast, and focus returns to the same pile after each move.

Settings

Card size — Standard, Large, Large Print. Large is the default. Large Print goes beyond a simple scale: the rank and suit symbol are enlarged relative to the card, the centre pip layout is simplified so a card reads as its rank rather than as a pattern, and the stack offset in the columns opens up so buried cards show their whole corner index instead of a sliver. Changing size re-lays the board so everything still fits without side-scrolling — which is what a card size setting gives you that browser zoom cannot. You can change it mid-game; the deal is untouched.

Theme — system, light, dark. Dark mode follows your system by default and can be forced either way. Note what dark mode does not do here: card faces stay near-white. Only the table and the page chrome go dark, so red and black pips keep their contrast instead of turning into two shades of grey.

Draw mode — Draw 1 or Draw 3 (Klondike). Draw 1 turns one card at a time and is much more forgiving; Draw 3 turns three and only the top one is playable. Switching re-deals the same seed, because the same layout plays completely differently under each rule — so if a game is under way we ask before throwing it away.

Winnable deals only. On by default. Each deal is played to completion by a solver before you see it, so at least one winning line exists. Turn it off for genuinely random deals, including the ones nobody can win.

Suit count (Spider). One, two or four suits. Changing it deals a new game, since it changes which deck is shuffled.

Settings are stored in your browser on that device — no account, no sync. If storage is blocked, the game runs normally on the defaults.

Deal numbers and replaying a game

Every game has a number, shown in the footer. Add it to the URL as ?seed= and that number and you get the identical layout back on any device — handy for replaying a deal that beat you or sending a friend the exact game you just played. Adding &draw=3 selects Draw 3.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to download or install anything?

No. The whole site runs in your browser — desktop, tablet or phone. There is no app, no plugin, no account and no email required. Your settings and stats are saved locally on the device you played on.

Does using undo or hints count against me?

No. Undo is unlimited, hints are free, and neither affects your stats, your time or a daily streak. On a solver-verified deal, backing up to try a different line is the intended way to play a hard position — it is how you find the line that works.