How to Play Solitaire: Klondike Rules & Setup

This page teaches you how to play solitaire the way most people mean when they say the word: Klondike, the single-player card game of building the tableau down and the foundations up. Klondike itself comes in a few different rule sets, so before the step-by-step rules, the next section says exactly which one this page describes and where the common variants diverge from it.

Which solitaire are you playing?

“Solitaire” covers dozens of single-player card games, and even within Klondike — the one almost everyone pictures — the exact rules differ by software and by table:

• Draw count. Standard turn-three Klondike flips three stock cards at once, but only the top card is playable; turn-one flips and exposes one card at a time, which solves far more often.
• Redeals. Most physical-deck play and classic Windows solitaire allow unlimited passes back through the stock once it’s exhausted. Some tournament and house rules cap you at one or three total redeals.
• Scoring. Standard scoring tracks points for foundation moves, stock draws and completion time. Vegas scoring replaces all of that with a cash buy-in and a per-card payout, settled once at the end.

This page describes standard turn-three Klondike with unlimited redeals and no scoring wager as the primary game, because it’s the version built into the most solitaire software and the one most physical-deck instructions default to. Turn-one draw, limited-redeal house rules, and Vegas scoring are each called out below as named variants wherever they change a rule.

Solitaire rules: how to play solitaire step by step

The rest of this page walks through the solitaire rules you need for a full game: the deal, the layout, how a turn works, moving cards between piles, scoring, how the game ends, and the common variations.

Setup and the deal

Shuffle a standard 52-card deck and deal the tableau: seven piles, numbered one through seven left to right. Pile one gets a single face-up card. Every pile after that gets one more card than the pile to its left, and every card except the last one dealt to that pile goes down face-down — so pile two is one face-down card plus one face-up card, pile three is two face-down cards plus one face-up card, and so on up through pile seven, which gets six face-down cards topped by a single face-up card. That uses 28 cards total. The remaining 24 cards form the stock, placed face-down to one side; the waste and the four foundation spaces next to it start empty.

The layout: tableau, stock, waste and foundations

Four zones make up the layout. The tableau is the seven piles you just dealt, where the main building happens. The stock is the face-down leftover deck you draw from. The waste is where drawn stock cards land face-up, playable from its top card only. The four foundations start empty and finish the game holding all 52 cards, one suit per foundation, built from ace up to king.

How a turn works

On your turn you can do any combination of three things, in any order, as long as each individual move is legal: play the top card of the waste or a tableau pile onto a foundation if it’s the next rank up in that foundation’s suit; move a face-up tableau card, or a valid face-up sequence, onto another tableau pile; or draw from the stock into the waste when you have no other move you want to make. There’s no fixed turn order to pass — you keep playing moves until you choose to draw again or until nothing is left to do.

Moving cards and building the tableau

Tableau piles build downward in rank, alternating red and black: a black jack can receive a red ten, which can receive a black nine, and so on. Only a pile’s face-up cards are ever available to move, and once you expose a face-down card by clearing everything on top of it, it flips face-up immediately and stays in play. An empty tableau pile is a special landing spot: only a king, or a face-up sequence starting with a king, may be placed there. If you enjoy Klondike’s build-a-sequence feel, Gin Rummy uses a related idea — laying off cards onto runs and sets — in a head-to-head two-player game instead of a solo one.

Scoring

Standard scoring awards 10 points for moving a card from the waste or tableau to a foundation, 5 points for moving a card between tableau piles, and deducts 2 points for every card you draw from the stock after the first pass through it; finishing within a set time window also adds a bonus. Vegas scoring works completely differently: you pay a fixed buy-in (traditionally $52, one dollar per card) before the deal, then each card you successfully bank on a foundation pays back a fixed amount — the game settles once, win or lose, against that buy-in rather than accumulating a running point total.

How the game ends

You win the moment all 52 cards sit on the four foundations, built up ace through king in suit. The game ends unplayed — a loss — once the stock, waste, and every tableau pile have no legal move left between them: nothing can go to a foundation, no tableau card or sequence can shift to another pile, and the stock is either empty or has already used up its allowed redeals. Many digital versions will flag this state for you; played with a physical deck, it’s on you to confirm no move remains before conceding.

Common variations

Turn-one Klondike, described above, trades difficulty for solvability by exposing every stock card individually instead of three at a time. Limited-redeal house rules cap you at one or three total passes back through an exhausted stock, rather than Klondike’s traditional unlimited redeals, and meaningfully raise the odds of getting stuck. Vegas scoring swaps the running point total for a cash buy-in and per-card payout, as described above. Beyond Klondike itself, dozens of other patience games share the deck and the single-player format but change the layout entirely — this page doesn’t cover those. If you’d rather play a card game against other people, Spades and Euchre are both trick-taking games built for a table instead of a solo session.