Klondike Solitaire Variants: Thoughtful to Westcliff

Klondike has more named variants than almost any other solitaire. Part of that is historical accident: Klondike was the default patience for Anglophone households through the twentieth century, and defaults spawn variations. Part of it is structural: the seven-column tableau, the stock-and-waste mechanism, and the alternating-color building rule give designers a lot of knobs to turn. Make the cards all face-up; take away the stock; change the color rule; allow same-suit moves; add a Joker. Every turn produces a new game with its own identity, and several of those new games have outlived their parents in regional play. This page walks the family tree, naming the variants that matter and explaining how each one changes what Klondike feels like at the table.

The variants we cover below range from research-grade to crowd-favourite. Thoughtful is the full-information testbed that academics use for solvability proofs. Easthaven trades the stock pile for staggered deals. Westcliff is the shorter, friendlier version for teaching. Whitehead bridges the gap toward FreeCell. Russian Solitaire is the punishing same-suit challenge. Yukon abolishes the stock in favour of freeform stacking. Joker Klondike is the children's wild-card variant. Vegas Klondike is the scoring overlay, and Spider's relationship to Klondike rounds out the lineage. Each variant trades one specific Klondike element for a different one, and each trade changes the feel of the game in a knowable way.

Thoughtful Solitaire is Klondike with every card visible from the first move. The tableau is dealt face-up, the stock is dealt face-up, and the player has complete information. The rules of movement are otherwise identical: alternating-color descending on the tableau, suited ascending on the foundations, Kings only on empty columns. What changes is the nature of the puzzle. With full information, the game becomes a pure planning exercise, and difficulty stops being about discovery and starts being about sequencing.

In practical play, Thoughtful sits between a puzzle book and a standard game. Players often use it to study positions they lost in regular Klondike: they reconstruct the deal with all cards face-up, then analyze whether the deal was solvable and where they went wrong. That study practice — replaying lost deals in Thoughtful mode — is one of the most effective ways to improve Klondike play, because it separates "unsolvable deal" from "player error" in a clean, provable way.

Thoughtful matters to researchers because it is the canonical testbed for Klondike solvability. Since every card is visible, a solver can plan a full game tree without worrying about hidden-state branching. That makes Thoughtful the natural setting for provable solvability results: a deal is solvable if and only if a winning sequence exists, and a solver can in principle enumerate the moves. The Bjarnason et al. 2007 paper we cite on our Klondike probability page used Thoughtful as its baseline framework.

The name itself is a hint at the game's purpose. "Thoughtful" contrasts with the reflex play that standard Klondike sometimes invites. In standard Klondike, a player can move quickly, react to what the stock reveals, and finish a deal in ten minutes without sustained planning. In Thoughtful, reflex is useless; the whole game is a planning problem. Players who enjoy chess problems or end-game studies tend to enjoy Thoughtful for the same reason — it rewards slow, deliberate reasoning over the entire sequence rather than in-the-moment reaction.

Strategy in Thoughtful is different from standard Klondike in one clarifying way: there is no reason to hold back on planning. Every long chain of foundation sends can be pre-computed, and the only question is whether the chain exists. Human players who try Thoughtful sometimes find it unsatisfying — the discovery aspect of Klondike is gone — but those who enjoy pure puzzle-solving find it rewarding. A solved Thoughtful deal is a small proof.

Easthaven is Klondike reconfigured as a deal-and-play game. It is one of the older documented Klondike relatives, appearing in mid-twentieth-century patience compendiums under several spellings. The essential idea is that the stock pile is not a fishing tool; it is a series of forced injections that the player must accept.

Easthaven is Klondike reconfigured as a deal-and-play game. The tableau has seven columns but no separate stock and waste; instead, a reserve holds the remaining cards, and the player deals a new row of seven cards across the tableau whenever they run out of legal moves. Three deals total across the game, so the player has twenty-one reserve cards stretched into three injections of seven. Between deals, the game is standard Klondike — alternating-color descending on the tableau, same-suit ascending on the foundations.

The strategic identity of Easthaven is built around those three deals. Each deal commits the player to seven new face-up cards landing on top of existing columns, potentially burying cards they were saving. The discipline is to sequence tableau work so that nothing important is on top of a column when the next deal comes. Players who treat Easthaven as "just Klondike with extra dealing" end up with columns stacked in useless orders; players who read the approaching deal and empty columns strategically finish much more often.

The three-deal limit also teaches a discipline unfamiliar in standard Klondike: anticipating the incoming row. Experienced Easthaven players think in terms of "what needs to be clear before the next deal?" Every time a column is full of useful sequences that are about to be buried by new cards, the player faces a forced choice: finish that column now, or accept burial. The rhythm of Easthaven is therefore less about the whole game and more about three distinct phases separated by the deals. A strong Easthaven player treats each phase as its own mini-game with its own local goals.

Easthaven win rates sit below Klondike because the dealt cards land unpredictably and the three-deal limit produces more locked positions. Because there is no stock cycling, a player cannot fish for needed cards; the game pushes cards at the player on its own schedule. That changes the feel entirely: standard Klondike rewards planning plus patience, Easthaven rewards planning plus speed.

Westcliff is the friendlier, shorter Klondike. It is a variant that predates the digital era and survived into the twentieth-century patience canon because it hits a sweet spot: recognizable Klondike mechanics with faster completion and less frustration. Several published compendiums list Westcliff alongside standard Klondike as a reasonable everyday alternative.

Westcliff is the friendlier, shorter Klondike. It deals thirty cards face-up into ten columns of three, starts the foundations with aces already placed, and runs through the stock in a single pass. Everything about the game points toward faster wins and lower frustration. The 30-card face-up layout means full information from the first move; the ace-primed foundations mean the scoring starts already in progress; the single stock pass keeps the game short.

Westcliff is often recommended as a gateway variant for players who find standard Klondike too punishing. Win rates in Westcliff are higher than standard Klondike across both casual and experienced play, and games typically finish in three to five minutes instead of ten to fifteen. That combination makes Westcliff a reasonable choice for quick sessions or for teaching new players Klondike mechanics without the hidden-state complication.

The ace-primed foundations are an interesting design choice. In standard Klondike, a significant fraction of early game time goes into finding and mobilizing the aces. Westcliff skips that stage entirely: the aces are already home when the deal begins. That shifts the game's centre of gravity from ace-hunting to chain-building, making the experience more about getting cards into long sequences than about bootstrapping the foundations.

Strategically, Westcliff is close to Thoughtful with a time limit. Every card is visible, so planning is the skill, but the single-pass stock adds a scarcity constraint that Thoughtful lacks. Players who have played Thoughtful often transition easily to Westcliff; players coming from standard Klondike find the full-information layout takes some adjustment.

Whitehead is one of the more interesting Klondike relatives because it changes two defining rules at once. Either change on its own would be modest; both together produce a game with its own identity. The variant is not widely played today, which is a shame — it rewards strategic thinking in a way that neither parent game fully does.

Whitehead keeps the Klondike seven-column layout but changes two rules that define the game. First, all cards are face-up from the start, so information is complete. Second, tableau building is same-color descending rather than alternating-color. A red 7 goes on a red 8, a black 6 goes on a black 7, and only same-suit groups move as units.

The same-color rule pulls Whitehead toward FreeCell's visibility and Spider's suit-sensitivity at once. It feels like a bridge game between the three families. Players coming from FreeCell find the visibility familiar and the column structure familiar, but the same-color rule trips them up because FreeCell uses alternating color. Players coming from Spider find the same-color rule familiar but the seven-column layout unfamiliar.

The same-color rule rewards a kind of reasoning that neither FreeCell nor standard Klondike emphasize. In alternating-color Klondike, we think of the tableau as a red-black dance; in Whitehead, we think of it as two parallel monochrome ladders that occasionally share Kings and foundation exits. Players develop a sense of "red tableau work" versus "black tableau work" and balance the two in the way that Spider players balance their ten columns.

Whitehead win rates are higher than standard Klondike thanks to full visibility, but lower than Westcliff because the same-color rule restricts sequence building. A good Whitehead player plans entire same-color chains before committing, because once a chain is broken the pieces cannot always rejoin on a different same-color chain mid-tableau. The best way to learn Whitehead is to play a few dozen deals deliberately slowly, tracing where every red card and every black card can realistically land across the whole game, and only then committing to moves. The game rewards that investment with clean finishes that neither standard Klondike nor FreeCell quite match.

Russian Solitaire is the punishing cousin. It strips away two of Klondike's mercies — the alternating-color building rule and the stock pile — and replaces them with harsher constraints. The result is one of the lowest-win-rate games in the Klondike family and a favorite among players who want a game where every deal feels like it matters.

Russian Solitaire is the punishing cousin. It uses the seven-column Klondike tableau but forbids the alternating-color rule entirely: tableau building is same-suit descending, so hearts build on hearts and spades on spades. There is no stock pile; all 52 cards are dealt into the tableau at the start, with later columns holding more cards and more face-downs.

The same-suit restriction is brutal. A player who needs a red 6 under a black 7 cannot put them together unless a suit-matching card bridges them, and the limited cards available make bridges rare. Win rates in Russian Solitaire are significantly lower than standard Klondike — often in the single digits for casual players, climbing only modestly with practice.

The name "Russian" is probably a twentieth- century attribution rather than a deep historical link; many solitaire variants acquired regional names during the English-language codification of the patience tradition. The defining feature is not geographic but mechanical: same-suit building on a Klondike tableau without a stock. That combination produces a distinctive feel that regulars often describe as "Klondike without mercy" because the game keeps removing the small recoveries that Klondike normally provides its players.

Solvability research on Russian Solitaire is thin compared to standard Klondike, but the intuition is clear: fewer bridges means more locked deals, and more locked deals means lower ceilings on both solver and human play.

Russian is a game for players who want the Klondike structure without the Klondike mercy. The absence of a stock pile means there is no fishing; the same-suit rule means there is no rescue. Every unfortunate face-down card is likely to stay stuck. Players who enjoy Russian tend to enjoy it for the same reason chess players enjoy endgame studies: every position is a puzzle with a narrow correct solution.

Yukon is Klondike with one transformative rule. The name comes from the same Yukon region that gave Klondike itself its name, and the two games often appear together in solitaire catalogs. Yukon is a serious Klondike relative in its own right, widely implemented in digital solitaire suites, and played by a meaningful share of the solitaire-playing audience.

Yukon is Klondike with one transformative rule: any face-up card can be moved together with the stack sitting on top of it, whether or not that stack forms a valid sequence. A black 9 with random cards above it on its column can be picked up as a unit and dropped on a red 10 elsewhere. The cards riding on top come along and land in a new home.

That single rule change dramatically raises win rates. Yukon is one of the more solvable Klondike-family games, with solvability estimates in the high eighties and observed human win rates much higher than standard Klondike. There is no stock pile, and all 52 cards are dealt into the tableau at the start — so the game is purely about rearranging and revealing face-downs. The movement freedom compensates for the loss of the stock.

The freeform move rule is the crucial design decision. Standard Klondike requires that a moved stack form a valid sequence at its destination; Yukon does not. That frees the player to use unrelated cards as temporary luggage: a King drags its entire column along, random cards and all, and drops the luggage on a new anchor where the pieces can be reorganized. It turns the tableau into a flexible workspace instead of a rigid stack.

Yukon is our recommended gateway variant for players who want Klondike's seven-column feel with less frustration. It rewards the same opening-card reading that Klondike does, but it punishes mistakes less harshly because the freeform stacking rule almost always provides a recovery path. See our Yukon page for rules and strategy. A player who wants the Klondike seven-column structure without the stock frustrations should start there.

Joker Klondike is the children's variant: standard Klondike with two Jokers added to the deck, playable as wild cards. The Jokers can substitute for any rank and any color, which makes them universal bridges. Games feel looser and finish more often, which is why the variant is popular in teaching settings. It is not played competitively and carries no published solvability research.

Teachers use Joker Klondike to give beginners a taste of winning. A child who has never finished a Klondike deal can finish a Joker Klondike deal within a few tries, and the completed game reinforces the rules better than any number of unfinished attempts. Once the child knows what a finished Klondike looks like, the Jokers come out and standard Klondike becomes accessible. The variant is pedagogically sensible even if it is not strategically interesting.

We include Vegas in the variant tour because the scoring change is material. A Klondike player who switches to Vegas scoring plays differently even with identical rules — they push for partial finishes, concede more aggressively on dead deals, and size their sessions around a bankroll instead of a target win count. The overlay is a variant in the experiential sense, if not the mechanical one.

Vegas Klondike overlays a scoring system on standard Klondike: the player buys each deal for $52 and earns $5 per foundation card. We cover the mechanics, the expected-value math, and the session strategy on our Klondike Vegas scoring page. For the purposes of this variant tour, Vegas is not a rule change — it is a scoring overlay on the rule set of standard Klondike, and it can be applied to Draw 1 or Draw 3.

Spider Solitaire is not technically a Klondike variant in the strict sense, descending from its own lineage of multi-deck patience games, but the two share enough structural DNA to belong in the same extended family of solitaires. but the two games share enough lineage that the family tree includes both. The parallels are structural: tableau plus foundations, descending tableau builds, suited foundation outputs. The differences are the ones that define Spider as its own family: two decks, ten columns, same-suit descending builds (in the four-suit version), and stock cards dealt across all columns rather than into a waste pile.

The stock mechanic is the defining break. Klondike serves cards one or three at a time into a personal waste pile, letting the player choose when and which to play. Spider deals ten cards simultaneously across every column, ignoring the player's preferences entirely. That design choice changes the shape of Spider strategy profoundly: decisions are frontloaded onto what to do before the next deal, because after the deal the tableau changes underneath the player. Klondike rewards patience with the stock; Spider punishes impatience by dumping cards whenever the player asks for more.

Historically, Spider and Klondike both emerge from the broader patience tradition that solidified in nineteenth-century England and Europe. Klondike sits closer to the original French patience tradition; Spider developed as a distinct lineage that borrowed the tableau-and-foundation architecture but reimagined the stock mechanic. The shared ancestry is why strategy from one carries over to the other in limited ways — both reward column emptying, both reward careful face-down management — while the tactical details differ sharply.

The shared vocabulary helps players cross over. Both games use tableau, foundations, and stock; both reward column emptying and face-down reveal; both punish premature foundation sends. A player who has learned the rhythm of Klondike can sit down to Spider and recognize the genre immediately, even as the details diverge. That shared vocabulary is why we place Spider in the extended Klondike family rather than treating it as an unrelated game.

Players who enjoy Klondike often try Spider next and find the two-deck structure disorienting, then eventually come to prefer the longer-form strategic depth. Players who start on Spider and come to Klondike find the seven-column layout cramped and the stock-and-waste rhythm unfamiliar. Both games belong in the core solitaire family, and we cover Spider in detail on its own dedicated pages across the network for readers who want to go deeper.