Klondike Solitaire

How to play: drag a card where it should go, or tap it and then tap its destination — both work, and the tap version is the one a phone has, since a drag is a mouse gesture the browser does not fire on a touchscreen. Tapping a card you have already picked up plays it straight to a foundation if it will go there, which is how you finish most games. Tap the blue stock pile to turn cards; when it runs out, tapping it again turns the waste back over.

The goal is all fifty-two cards on the four foundations at the top right, each built up from Ace to King in a single suit. Everything else is about getting at the cards you cannot currently reach.

The two building rules. On the seven tableau piles you build downward in alternating colours: a black 9 goes on a red 10, a red 8 on that black 9, and so on. On the foundations you build upward in one suit: the Ace of Hearts, then the 2 of Hearts, and so on to the King. An empty tableau pile is the most valuable space on the board, and only a King — or a run headed by a King — may move into one.

Runs move as a unit. Taking a face-up card part-way down a pile — by drag or by tap — picks up that card and everything below it, provided the whole sequence is already a legal alternating run. Drop anywhere on the destination column; the pile is the target, not the one card on top of it. Uncovering a face-down card turns it over, which is the only way the hidden twenty-one cards dealt into the tableau ever come into play.

Draw 1 versus draw 3. Draw 1 turns a single card at a time and lets you reach every card in the stock, so most deals are winnable with careful play. Draw 3 turns three at once and only the top of the three is playable, which means two cards in every three are locked behind the one in front of them until you cycle the stock again. Draw 3 is the harder, older game; draw 1 is the one most people mean by "solitaire" today. Switching modes deals a new game, because the two are not the same puzzle from the same layout.

Strategy that actually moves the needle. Turn over face-down cards before anything else — a move that reveals a new card is almost always better than one that does not. Prefer the pile with the most face-down cards when you have a choice, because that is where the game is stuck. Do not rush Aces and 2s up to the foundations if a low card is still doing useful work holding a run in the tableau; once a card is on a foundation it is hard to get back, and this game does let you play one back down when you need it. Empty a column only when you have a King ready to fill it, or you have swapped a working pile for dead space.

Deals are numbered, and the number is the game. Every deal gets a six-digit number, and the same number always lays the cards out the same way, on any device. If you lose a game you liked the look of, the number is enough to play it again. Your game is also saved in your own browser as you play, so closing the tab does not lose the deal — nothing is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it.

Once everything is face up and the stock is empty, the rest of the game is bookkeeping — a Finish button appears and runs the cards up for you.

Klondike is named after the Yukon gold rush of the late 1890s, which is where the game is usually said to have spread from, though patience games of this shape are older than that and European in origin. It became the best-known card game in the world for an accident of software history: Microsoft bundled a version with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly to teach people how to drag with a mouse. This is an independent implementation of the public-domain game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Microsoft.