Free Solitaire

How to play: the basics in thirty seconds

The goal of solitaire is simple: rebuild all four suits (hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades) in ascending order, from ace to king, on the four foundation slots at the top of the board. To get there, you move the face-up cards in the tableau (the seven columns at the bottom) by stacking them in descending order while alternating colors: a red card on a black card, then a black card on that red card, and so on. A king can only be placed on an empty column, never on top of another card.

Two ways to move a card work on this page: classic drag-and-drop (click, hold, drag to the destination), or tap-to-move: a single click on a card sends it automatically to the first valid destination, foundations first. The stock pile in the top left turns over one or three cards at a time depending on your draw mode; once it runs out, click the empty stock icon to recycle it from the waste pile.

At the start of a new deal, the board lays out the cards automatically in the classic Klondike arrangement:

1. The first column gets a single card, dealt face up.
2. The second column gets two cards: one face down, then one face up on top.
3. Each following column gets one more card than the last, up to the seventh column, which holds seven cards, always with a single face-up card on top.
4. The remaining twenty-four cards form the stock pile, entirely face down.

That summary is enough to start playing right away. For a detailed, step-by-step explanation with worked examples (a jammed stock pile, no moves left, when to give up on a deal), see the how to play solitaire page.

Why play here instead of another site

There are dozens of free solitaire sites online. Here is what this page actually offers:

Nothing you play is uploaded anywhere: see the privacy page for the full explanation of what this site saves locally and what it never collects.

• Table color, card back color and pattern all customizable from the Settings button, so you can match the look you want.
• Light or dark theme, remembered automatically for your next visit.
• Works offline once the page has loaded: the game runs entirely in your browser, no game data is sent to a server while you play.
• No sign-up and nothing to install: the board loads straight in your browser, no email, no password, no app to download.
• Your best time is saved locally on your device, without ever leaving your browser.

Three example situations, and how to think through them

Three scenarios come up in almost every game of solitaire. Recognizing them helps you play faster and get stuck less often.

Scenario 1, an ace trapped near the bottom of a column. An ace is face up, but under two or three other cards that are already usefully stacked. Instead of tearing that column apart, first look for a move that frees the card above the ace without breaking a sequence that is useful elsewhere. If no move does that, be patient: the stock pile will eventually deal the missing card so you can keep building the column above it.

Scenario 2, two empty columns at the same time. Having two empty columns at once is a strong position: it lets you juggle long sequences of cards, including splitting them temporarily to make room for a king. This situation is worth using before you draw more cards, because it disappears as soon as a king or a long sequence occupies one of the two columns.

Scenario 3, the stock pile cycling without unlocking anything. After one or two full passes through the stock pile with no new move available, the deal is probably stuck for good. It is usually better to start a new deal (the button at the top of the board) than to keep trying: the initial shuffle determines whether a Klondike deal can be won at all, and roughly one deal in five is not solvable no matter how it is played.

More habits worth building, especially around which column to clear first and how to manage the stock pile, are covered on the solitaire tips page, alongside the full rules on the how to play solitaire page.

Quick glossary: solitaire vocabulary

A handful of terms come up constantly in solitaire rules. Knowing them removes any confusion when reading an explanation or a players' forum:

Tableau

The seven columns of cards at the bottom of the board, where alternating-color sequences are built.

Foundation

The four slots at the top right, one per suit, filled from ace to king to win the game.

Stock (or draw pile)

The pile of cards not dealt to the tableau at the start, turned over gradually during play.

Waste pile

The card currently turned face up from the stock, available to be played or set aside.

Sequence (or run)

A group of cards stacked in a tableau column, alternating in color and descending in value, that can be moved together as a block.

This vocabulary is explained again with worked examples on the how to play solitaire page.

Solitaire, Klondike, patience: one game, several names

The same game goes by several names depending on the country and the generation: solitaire in the most common usage today in the US, Klondike as the specific name of this exact variant (there are other solitaire variants too, see the comparison table below), and patience in British and older card-game vocabulary. The rules do not change between names: it is the same single-player card game, with the same goal of filling four foundations.

Solitaire is generally believed to have started as a European card-based fortune-telling and patience exercise in the 18th century, later spreading to North America in paper form and then becoming one of the first games bundled with personal computers in the 1990s, which is a large part of why it is still one of the most recognizable card games in the world today.

Who this free solitaire game is for

Solitaire attracts very different kinds of players, and this page was built with all of them in mind: someone who wants a five-minute break between two tasks, without opening yet another app on their phone; a regular player looking for a faithful version of classic Klondike, without a house variant that quietly changes the rules; or simply someone who wants to play, on a screen, the card game they used to play with an actual deck.

Solitaire is also often used as a concentration exercise: unlike a game against an opponent, there is no pressure and no imposed clock, just the cards and a sequence of logical decisions to work through. That is part of why the elapsed time shown at the top of the board stays entirely optional in practice: nothing stops you from playing slowly, mentally reconsidering a column, or leaving a deal paused before coming back to it later.

For players who want to improve faster, or simply lose less often to a move played too early, the how to play solitaire page covers the most common mistakes and the order in which to clear tableau columns.

Comparing the main solitaire variants

Klondike, the variant on this page, is the best known, but it is not the only one. Here is how it compares to the other major solitaire families:

This page focuses on Klondike because it is the version the large majority of players are looking for under the words solitaire, Klondike or patience. The other variants are not just curiosities: each one exercises a different skill (positional memory for Spider, full-information planning for FreeCell), which is why regular Klondike players often end up trying them too, once they have the basics down.