Klondike, explained from the ground up: a Spider player's field guide

Every Spider player we know learned Klondike first. It is the seven-column game with a draw pile in the corner that came free on office PCs, and in the United States plain "Solitaire" almost always means it. On spidersolitaire.us we treat Klondike as a reference point: the rung in the middle of our difficulty ladder that every other game, Spider included, gets measured against. This page teaches it properly — its murky history, its vocabulary, the exact rules our version uses, and a guided first game.

Klondike ranks above one-suit Spider and well below two suits on our ladder. The detailed odds are on the Turn 3 page and in the short summary further down; this page is about playing the game, not measuring it.

A short, honest history

The name is a small mystery. It is often linked to the Klondike Gold Rush in the Canadian Yukon at the end of the 1890s, but the Wikipedia entry for the game says no evidence supports that story, and the true origin is unknown. The paper trail starts in 1907, when rules for "Seven-Card Klondike" were printed in an edition of Hoyle's Games.

Two naming quirks trip people up. British players often just say "Patience" for this game. And older American sources sometimes call Klondike "Canfield", a label that now normally refers to a different game altogether, so be careful with vintage rule books.

The game's modern fame is a computing story. Microsoft Solitaire, a version of Klondike, shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990, and Wikipedia notes that its place in Windows through the 1990s did a great deal to make Klondike as popular as it is now.

Klondike vocabulary in one table

A single 52-card deck, four areas of the table, and a few words that every hint and tutorial assumes you know.

The rules our version follows

The target

Get all four suits onto their foundations, Ace first and King last. The deal is won when the fifty-second card goes home.

What you may do

• Stack down, swapping colors. Put a card on the next rank up in the other color. A red 4 takes a black 3; a black Jack takes a red 10.
• Carry whole sequences. An ordered red-black stack travels together, provided the card at its head fits the target.
• Reveal hidden cards. Clear the face-up cards off a column's hidden card and it turns over for you.
• Fill gaps with Kings only. An empty column accepts a King, or a sequence headed by one, and nothing else.
• Draw one at a time. Here the stock gives one card per click. The draw toggle switches to the three-card game.
• Recycle the waste without limit. An exhausted stock is refilled from the waste as often as you want.
• Take cards back from home. Foundations build strictly by suit, but the game lets you pull a card back down to the tableau when it helps.

A guided first deal

Try this order of thinking on your next game. It is the same order a strong player runs through almost without noticing.

1. Survey before you click. Scan the seven exposed cards for Aces, 2s and easy pairings. About one deal in twelve offers nothing at all there, and you simply begin with the stock.
2. Bank the Aces. An Ace has no use in the tableau, so it should go home the moment it appears.
3. Favor moves that flip cards. Freeing a hidden card beats rearranging face-up ones nearly every time. Columns five, six and seven sit on the most hidden cards; work on them early.
4. Then turn the stock. Because the stock recycles endlessly, a card you skip now will come around again. Draw with purpose, not panic.
5. Be slow with middle ranks. A 6 sent home too soon may be the only place a 5 of the other color could have gone. Aces, 2s and 3s rarely hurt to play up; above that, wait until the lower cards of the other color are safe.
6. Have a King waiting. Clearing a column pays off only if a King is ready to move in. Otherwise the space sits idle.
7. Let Auto Play finish. When nothing is hidden and the stock is no longer in the way, one click sends the rest home.

The odds in three lines

Klondike went through the same test bench as every other rung:

• 42.3% of 10,000 Turn 1 deals won by a straightforward program that plays only the cards it can see and never takes a move back.
• 76.6% to 97.9% of deals winnable according to our solver, which could see every card: 76.6% of 1,000 deals proven winnable, 21.3% left unsettled.
• 90.48%, the published estimate from Blake and Gent for the same kind of all-seeing play.

So the cards are usually beatable; winning takes attention. The complete breakdown lives on our Spider home page's ladder and the Turn 3 page, and one-suit Spider is the rung just below.

Handy Klondike terms

• Buried card: one you need that is trapped under cards you cannot yet shift.
• Open column: an emptied column, ready for a King.
• Pass: one trip through the whole stock before the waste is turned back.
• Face-down card: a hidden tableau card; revealing all 21 of them is the heart of the game.
• Going home: moving a card up to its foundation.
• Draw count: one card per click (Turn 1) or three (Turn 3).

Klondike's toolkit on this site

There is no charge, no installer and no login: Klondike opens in your browser on a laptop, tablet or phone. You can blow the cards up with the zoom control, lean on a Hint, rewind with unlimited Undo, start the same deal over with Restart, and let Auto Play clear up the end. Move cards by dragging or with two taps. A small tracker shows wins, time and moves for the current deal, and the settings cover sound, fullscreen and the felt color.

Where the Klondike numbers come from

Our team measured Klondike in September 2026 for the spidersolitaire.us difficulty ladder. The process, in order:

1. Confirmed which code this page runs. It shares its engine and rules with the site's other Turn 1 Klondike page, unlimited redeals included, so the same results apply.
2. Wrote the game as software, then ran 2,000 games purely to confirm it never breaks a rule.
3. Generated every shuffle from a seed number, making the deals repeatable card for card.
4. Set up a floor and a ceiling. The floor is a no-peeking, no-undo program; the ceiling is a search that is allowed to see hidden cards.
5. Ran the numbers: 10,000 deals for the floor player; 1,000 for the search, capped at 150,000 positions per deal.
6. Checked outside research. The published all-seeing estimate of 90.48%, from Blake and Gent (Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2026), falls between our lower and upper bounds of 76.6% and 97.9%.
7. Gave the uncertainty. The floor player's 42.3% has a 95% range of 41.3% to 43.3%.
8. Owned the gaps. Roughly one deal in five beat the search budget, so the ceiling is a window, not a point.

Under the Klondike hood

All of it is Python 3.11 with nothing outside the standard library. klondike.py holds both players: the floor player works down a ranked list of move types, while the search explores depth-first and keeps a record of positions it has visited so it never repeats one. Our runner fanned the deals out over 19 processes on one machine. We had help from Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic, in writing and checking the programs and in shaping this guide. The figures on the page were computed by those programs; the AI did not generate any of them.

Klondike, quickly answered

Does "Solitaire" mean Klondike?

For most people in the U.S., yes. The default "Solitaire" on computers and phones is Klondike.

Is the Gold Rush where the name comes from?

Possibly, but nobody has shown it. The origin is unknown.

How big is the stock?

Twenty-four cards. The other twenty-eight form the tableau.

What can go into an empty column here?

A King, or any sequence that begins with one.

How many trips through the stock am I allowed?

No, recycle it as often as you like.

What should a Klondike player try next?

The Turn 3 playbook for the three-card draw, Solitaire Double for the two-deck version, or anything on the games page.

By Admin, spidersolitaire.us (Solitairen OOD). Research run September 2026.