Klondike Solitaire Rules and Strategy: Why Most Players Get Stuck on Column 3

2026-11-09 · 8 min read

Klondike is the game most people mean when they say solitaire. The rules fit on a card. Yet players who can explain every rule still lose most games, and the losing move often happens in the same place: the third column. This guide covers the complete rules, then the strategy that separates a tidy-looking game from a game you actually finish.

The deal: 28 cards on the table, 24 in the stock

Shuffle one 52-card deck. Deal seven columns from left to right. Column 1 gets one card, column 2 gets two, and so on up to column 7. That uses 28 cards. Only the top card of each column is face up; the other 21 are face down.

The remaining 24 cards form the stock, face down in the top-left corner. Four empty foundations sit in the top-right. Build each foundation up from ace to king in one suit. A finished foundation holds 13 cards. When all 52 cards are on the foundations, you have won.

The only three legal moves

Tableau: descending and alternating colors

A card may be placed on another face-up card if it is one rank lower and the opposite color. A red 7 goes on a black 8. It cannot go on a red 8. A face-up run can move as one unit, but every card in the run must be face up and every adjacent pair must follow the same descending, alternating-color rule.

Empty columns: kings only

When a column is empty, only a king may be placed there, and its suit does not matter. This is the rule people confuse with FreeCell. In FreeCell, any card can go into an empty column. In Klondike, only a king can.

Foundations: one suit, ascending from the ace

An empty foundation takes an ace. After that it takes the next card of the same suit, one rank higher. Cards on the foundations cannot come back to the tableau, so every card you send up is a card the tableau has to live without.

How the stock and waste pile work

Click the stock to turn one card, or three cards, face up to the waste pile. Only the top card of the waste pile can be moved or sent to a foundation. When the stock is empty, click it again and the waste pile turns back over as the new stock. You can recycle as many times as you like.

The recycle does not shuffle anything. The first card you turned is still the first card you will see after the recycle, so the order is the same on every pass. Draw-one players can reach every stock card. Draw-three players have to think about position, because only the top card of each group of three is available.

Two details in this implementation are worth knowing. Undo keeps the last 200 moves, so you can walk a bad sequence back to the start. Auto-complete is not always available: it needs an empty stock, an empty waste pile, no face-down cards on the tableau, and a greedy order that really finishes the game. If any of those conditions fails, you have to move the cards yourself.

Why so many games die on column 3

Look at the opening board. Columns 1, 2 and 3 hold six cards between them, and only three are face up. Column 3 by itself has three cards, two of them face down. It looks like spare space, and it is close enough to the middle to be useful as a staging area.

The trouble is that column 3 is the easiest place to make a legal move that accomplishes nothing. You can spend five moves shuffling face-up cards between the short columns, keep the board looking tidy, and never turn over a hidden card. Every one of those moves felt correct, because it was legal.

Face-down cards are the only thing on the board that adds information. You start with seven face-up cards and 21 hidden ones. Flipping a card gives you a new rank and a new color to build on. It can also empty a column, which gives you a place to park a king. Moving a visible card from one visible spot to another adds nothing.

Column 3 is where this pattern usually starts because it is short, central enough to be useful, and easy to fill. By the time the column matters, it has a stack on top of it. Clearing it now costs more moves than it would have at the start, the hidden cards underneath are still hidden, and the stock is closer to empty.

None of this means column 3 is cursed. The same failure can happen in column 2 or column 5. The lesson is to notice the moment when your moves stop revealing information.

Five tips that change the outcome

Draw one versus draw three

Draw one turns a single card at a time. All 24 stock cards pass through your hand, and after a recycle the order is unchanged, so every card remains reachable. Win rates are much higher. This is the better mode for learning move order, because a mistake costs time rather than access.

Draw three turns three cards at once, but only the top one is playable. The stock takes eight passes instead of 24. The second and third cards of each triple stay buried until the cards above them leave the waste pile, or until you recycle. Nothing about the deck order has changed. What changed is reachability.

That is why draw three feels less fair. The same card that is always available in draw one may go missing for several passes. It is harder, but it is not unsolvable, and the extra difficulty is mostly about planning which cards you can afford to leave behind.

On this site, best times and move counts are recorded separately for each mode. Switching modes deals a new game; the current deal is not preserved.

Common questions