Klondike solitaire strategy
Klondike mixes luck and decisions. The shuffle decides which cards are hidden where, and you decide the order in which they come out. This guide sticks to rules of thumb that hold up in practice and shows them on small boards. If you need a refresher on the moves themselves, start with the rules guide.
Heuristics, not guarantees. Most of this page is judgment: guidance that usually helps and sometimes doesn't. A few plays are safe every time, and those are labeled as such. Not every shuffled deal can be won, however well you play, so a stalled game is not always a mistake.
Moves that are safe
- Aces to the foundation. Nothing in the game needs an ace as a base for a column, so sending one up is always fine.
- A 2 whose ace is already up. The only card that could sit on a 2 in a column is an ace, and aces belong on the foundation. So the 2 can follow.
Everything else comes down to trade-offs.
Heuristics for the tableau
Uncover hidden cards, starting with the tallest column
Every face-down card is unknown, and a column with many of them holds the most information and the most potential trouble. When two moves are available, favor the one that turns over a card, and among those favor the column with the most face-down cards.
Order matters as much as the choice. In the position below, the 5 of hearts can go onto the 6 of clubs, but that puts a card on top of the column you most want to open. The 6 of clubs can move to the 7 of hearts.
Move the 6 of clubs onto the 7 of hearts first, and the 5 of hearts can follow it there:
Both columns turned over a card, and the five-card column dropped to four. The cards revealed in this example are just an illustration; a real deal will show you something else.
Use the tableau before the stock
Before you click the stock, look for moves on the board. Drawing puts three new cards on top of the waste and covers whatever was playable there. Playing the tableau first also shows you which cards you are waiting for, which makes the stock easier to read.
Don't empty a column without a king in mind
An empty column is only useful if a king can fill it, so the question is whether you have a king to place. If a king is already face up, or is on the waste, emptying a column can be a good plan. If every king is still buried, an empty column can sit idle while other columns stay blocked.
This is a judgment call. Emptying a column can still be right if it turns over a card or frees a needed card, but check first.
When you have a choice of black or red, look ahead
Sometimes a red 6 can go on either of two black 7s. Prefer the 7 whose column is already open (no face-down cards beneath it) and keep the other 7 clear, so the column with hidden cards stays easy to dig into.
Heuristics for the foundations
Be careful about sending cards up too early
A foundation is a good place for a card you're done with, but a card on a foundation can't serve as a base in the tableau. Black cards need red cards to land on, and red cards need black ones. If you send both red 4s up while a black 3 is waiting for a home, that 3 is stuck.
A rough guide is to keep the four piles fairly level, and to be slower to send up the middle ranks (4 through 7) whose cards are the most likely to be needed as bases. In ShuffleFast you can drag the top card of a foundation back down, so an early move can be undone, but it uses moves.
The draw-three stock
This section is about draw three. In draw one, every card in the stock comes up on top by itself, so there is no group to plan around.
The stock is drawn three cards at a time, and only the top card of the waste is playable. The two cards under it are hidden by the top card until you play it. So planning a draw means looking at all three cards, not just the top one.
In this position, all three waste cards can be played, but only in that order. If the top card had no place to go, the other two would be out of reach until the next pass.
The stock can be recycled as often as you like, and the cards come back in the same order. That means a full pass with no plays shows you exactly the same cards again. If a whole pass changed nothing, look for a different plan on the tableau rather than cycling again. After a pass where you did play cards, the groups of three shift, and cards that were buried before can come up on top.
No undo, so slow down
ShuffleFast has no undo button. Most tableau moves can be reversed by moving the cards back, as long as the column you moved them onto still accepts them. A card turned over from a column stays turned over, and a stock click can only be recycled through a full pass. Treat those as final.
The suggested moves under the board can help you notice plays you missed. They cover straightforward moves only, so use them as a second opinion.
Common mistakes
- Drawing from the stock while a useful tableau move is still available.
- Emptying a column with no king available.
- Sending both cards of a color to the foundation and leaving a card of the other color with nowhere to go.
- Moving a king out of a column that has no face-down cards below it. It gains nothing and uses up a move.
- Going through the stock again and again without playing any cards.
Why a deal might stall
Even careful play can end in a position with no productive move. The usual causes are a card you need being buried under cards that can't move, a king sitting on top of face-down cards with no empty column to take it, and stock cards sitting in the wrong order for the group of three they are drawn in. When that happens, it is often the deal, and not the decisions, that has run out of options. Start a new game and try again.
Playing Spider or FreeCell instead? Their own tips are on the Spider solitaire page and the FreeCell page.