Play Klondike Solitaire Online — Free, Draw 1 & Draw 3

TSBy The Strategy Desk·Published April 5, 2026

Klondike is the card game most people simply call "Solitaire." Originally popularized during the Klondike Gold Rush and later made famous by Microsoft Windows, it remains the most-played solitaire variant in the world. Deal seven tableau columns, build four foundation piles from Ace to King, and try to clear the board.

How Klondike Works

A single 52-card deck is dealt into seven columns. Column 1 gets 1 card, column 2 gets 2, and so on up to 7 cards in column 7. Only the top card of each column is face-up; the rest are hidden. The remaining 24 cards form the stock pile.

Build tableau columns in descending order with alternating colors — a red 6 on a black 7, a black Queen on a red King. Move Aces to the foundations and build up by suit to King. Only Kings can fill empty columns. Draw from the stock when you need more options.

Draw 1 vs Draw 3

In Draw 1 mode, you flip one card at a time from the stock — easier and great for beginners. In Draw 3 mode, you flip three cards but can only play the top one — significantly harder and the traditional competitive variant. Use the toggle above the game to switch between modes.

History & Origins

Klondike takes its name from the Yukon region of northwest Canada, where the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–99 drew roughly 100,000 prospectors north along the Chilkoot and White Pass trails. Patience historians — including David Parlett in The Penguin Book of Card Games — document the game travelling alongside miners through those camps, which likely gave it its regional name. Before Microsoft, Klondike lived in parlour books under several aliases (Canfield in some American sources, though strictly a different game, and "Fascination" in 19th-century English compilations). Its modern dominance dates to 1990, when Wes Cherry coded Windows Solitaire as an intern at Microsoft and Susan Kare designed the card faces. Shipped with Windows 3.0, Solitaire onboarded a generation to the mouse. It has since shipped on more installed computers than any other game in history, which makes Klondike — plausibly — the most-played card game ever.

Strategic Principles

Klondike rewards a set of concrete habits more than it rewards raw calculation. We teach the following rules of thumb:

• Reveal face-down cards as early as possible. Every hidden card is a missing piece of the puzzle. A move that uncovers a face-down tableau card is almost always better than a move that does not, even when both are otherwise equal.
• Play from the longest stack first. Column 7 starts with 6 hidden cards, column 6 with 5, and so on. Uncovering early reveals in columns 6 and 7 gives you the most downstream information.
• Do not promote low cards to the foundation too fast. A 2 or 3 on the foundation cannot come back to the tableau. If that 2 could still host a red Ace later, leaving it in the tableau keeps options alive.
• Cycle the waste pile deliberately in Draw 3. Every three-card advance changes which card sits on top. Walk through the entire stock at least once before committing to a tableau plan — you need to know what is coming.
• When both Kings are available, keep the one that leads a usable sequence. Dumping the first King into an empty column is the single most common losing move in Klondike. Wait for a King whose same-suit Queen is already accessible.
• Track colour parity on the foundation. Klondike needs alternating-colour tableau builds, so if you send a red 5 to the foundation you need a black 4 somewhere to continue descending — check before the foundation move.

A left-to-right play order is a reasonable default for uncovering early, but it is not a rule — follow the information, not the layout.

Difficulty & Win Rate

Klondike sits in an unusual spot in the solitaire family: its solvability ceiling is high, but the hidden-card constraint crushes human win rates. The best academic estimate comes from Bjarnason, Fern & Tadepalli's 2007 paper "Lower Bounding Klondike Solitaire with Monte-Carlo Planning," which establishes an upper bound of roughly 82% solvability for Draw 1 under thoughtful play (i.e. with full information). Blake & Gent's 2013 work pushed similar solvability bounds for Draw 3 in the 78–82% range with unlimited redeals.

Those are ceilings. Real human play — where you cannot see the face-down cards when choosing a move — produces much lower numbers. Typical human win rates cluster at 30–40% in Draw 1 and 15–20% in Draw 3. Our own data reflects that spread. See our Klondike Strategy guide for the full methodology notes.

Common Mistakes

The most frequent losing moves we see in Klondike:

• Placing Kings into empty columns prematurely. A King with no matching Queen nearby freezes the column and wastes the most valuable structural slot in the game.
• Sending 2s and 3s to the foundation immediately. Those low cards often have tableau jobs to do. Once they land on the foundation they cannot come back.
• Forgetting to cycle the waste. Players often exhaust tableau options and then restart without having flipped through the full stock. In Draw 3, you may need two or three full cycles to see a specific card.
• Ignoring what hides beneath a playable card. Before moving a tableau stack, count the face-down cards you will expose. A move that uncovers more information is almost always the better move.
• Committing to a colour sequence without checking the other colour. Klondike alternates red and black. Sending one colour to the foundation can orphan descending sequences in the opposite colour.
• Redeal fatigue. Draw 3 with unlimited redeals tempts endless cycling. If two full passes produce no new tableau moves, the deal is likely dead.
• Not using undo as a research tool. Our undo is unlimited — explore a line, then back out if it closes down. That is not cheating; it is how modern players study positions.

How This Game Compares

Klondike is the reference point for the whole solitaire family, so most comparisons run through it:

• Klondike vs FreeCell: FreeCell is deterministic — all cards face-up, no stock, ~99.9987% solvable. Klondike hides 21 cards and relies on a stock pile, which injects genuine randomness. FreeCell rewards perfect planning; Klondike rewards good decisions under uncertainty.
• Klondike vs Canfield: Canfield (historically called Demon) shares the reserve-and-foundation structure but adds a 13-card reserve pile and draws three cards from the stock with only one redeal. It is markedly harder — solver analyses place win rates around 35%.
• Klondike vs Yukon: Yukon is essentially Klondike with every card face-up and no stock pile — you see the entire tableau from turn one. It is a purer information game with ~85% solvability but no randomness.

Variant Notes

Klondike has several widely played variants:

• Draw 1 vs Draw 3: Draw 1 flips one card at a time and produces higher win rates. Draw 3 flips three at a time but only the top card is immediately playable — traditional competitive play.
• Vegas scoring: You "buy" the deck for $52 and earn $5 per card sent to the foundation. Break-even requires 11 foundation cards. Vegas typically restricts redeals (one pass in Draw 3, three passes in Draw 1) and treats each deal as a standalone wager.
• Thoughtful Solitaire: Academic research variant where all face-down cards are revealed from the start. This is the configuration solvers like Bjarnason et al. actually analysed — it is how the ~82% solvability figure was established.
• Limited redeals: Many classic clients cap redeals at 1–3 passes, which significantly lowers win rates versus unlimited cycling.

Klondike vs FreeCell

The biggest difference is information. In FreeCell, every card is visible from the start — it's a pure logic puzzle where 99.999% of deals are solvable. In Klondike, 21 cards start face-down, so luck plays a larger role. Many Klondike deals are genuinely unwinnable regardless of play. For a detailed comparison, see our FreeCell vs Klondike guide.

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn More

• How to Play Klondike Solitaire — Complete rules and setup guide
• Klondike Strategy Guide — Tips to win more games
• Klondike FAQ — Common questions answered
• FreeCell vs Klondike — Head-to-head comparison
• Play Spider Solitaire — Another classic solitaire variant
• Types of Solitaire — Explore 20+ solitaire variants