Klondike Solitaire
Klondike is the solitaire everyone pictures: seven tableau columns, four foundations, and a stock you turn one or three cards at a time. Every deal is a fresh puzzle of deciding which buried card to dig for first and which column to leave alone. Boxless runs it in the browser with undo, restart and a draw-count you pick before you deal — and anyone you send the room code to can watch the game unfold live on their own screen.
- Players
- 1
- Playing time
- 10 min
- Ages
- 8 to adult
- Onlookers
- Welcome
How it's played
Klondike is the solitaire everybody already half-knows. The whole game is a dig: twenty-eight cards go down on the table and only seven of them are facing you.
One deck. Seven columns, each one card longer than the last, and only the bottom card of each turned over.
- Stock — the 24 cards you did not deal out
- Waste — turned over, top card live
- Foundations — four empty places, any ace opens one
- Tableau — seven columns to work in
of those twenty-eight cards are face down, and you have not been told a single one of them. Turning them over is the game. Every move you make is either a dig or a wasted turn.
Cards move two ways, and the two ways disagree
In the columns: down
Each card goes on one rank higher and the opposite color. Black six onto red seven, never onto black seven. A run of face-up cards travels as a block.
On the foundations: up
An ace opens a pile, then up by one in that same suit, no colors involved. Four piles, ace through king. That is what you are actually filling.
So a card is useful in one place and useless in the other, and most of Klondike is deciding which of the two you need it for right now.
The stock comes back around
- Turn one card, or turn three. You pick before the deal. One is kinder; three is the version most people learned.
- Only the top of the waste is live. Play it and the card under it wakes up.
- Run out and it recycles. The waste goes back under as stock and you go around again, as many times as you like — free if you are turning three, and 100 points a lap if you are turning one.
- Nothing is hidden from you twice. Anything you have seen once will come back around, so a card you could not use is not gone.
And you are being scored the whole time
There is nobody to beat, but the moves are priced. It is the scoring most people have seen without ever reading it, so here it is written down.
- Turning a face-down card over
- +5
- Waste to a column
- +5
- Waste or a column to a foundation
- +10
- Pulling a card back off a foundation
- −15
- Recycling the stock, turning one
- −100
The score never drops below zero, so a bad run costs you the points you had rather than putting you in a hole.
An empty column will only take a king
Nothing else may move into the gap — not a queen, not a run. So clearing a column is worth far less than it looks unless you are holding a king to put in it, and emptying one you cannot fill is how a winnable deal quietly stops being winnable.
All fifty-two, home.
You have won when every foundation runs ace to king. There is nobody to beat and no clock — the deal either comes apart or it doesn't, and the score is just how well you took it apart.
Some deals cannot be won at all
A share of shuffles are lost before you touch them, no matter how well you play. That is not a flaw in Klondike, it is the reason a solved one feels like anything. Undo as far back as you want, or restart and take a fresh deal.
Four complete suits. Fifty-two cards.
If the room liked this
Tame eight legs of cards by building complete suit sequences from King to Ace.
Nothing is face down and almost every deal can be won. Four free cells hold cards aside while you unstack eight columns.
Pair up cards that add to 13 to demolish a seven-row pyramid. The order you pair in is the whole game.