Klondike Solitaire Rules — How to Play and Score

Overview

Klondike is the patience game everyone means when they say "solitaire": seven tableau piles, four foundations, and a stock you turn over looking for the card you need. On its own it needs no scorepad, but as soon as you play a run of deals — or several people race the same layout — the scoring systems make it a proper contest.

Setup

Shuffle a 52-card pack. Deal seven piles left to right of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 cards, with only the top card of each pile face up: 28 cards in the tableau, 21 of them face down. The remaining 24 cards become the stock. The four foundations start empty.

How to play

Build the foundations up by suit, ace first, through to king. Build the tableau down in alternating colours — a red seven onto a black eight. Move a face-up run as a unit. Turning up a face-down tableau card is free progress. Only a king, or a run headed by a king, may go into an empty tableau space. Turn stock cards to the waste one or three at a time, playing the top waste card where you can. When the stock is empty, the waste can be turned over and gone through again, at a price.

Scoring

Standard. Start at 0 and score each move:

The running total is floored at 0 — penalties can never push a deal negative. A completed deal scores in the region of 700 to 900 depending on how many waste-to-tableau moves it took.

Vegas. Each deal starts at −52, as if you had bought the pack at a pound a card, and pays +5 for every card reaching a foundation. A perfect deal banks 52 × 5 = 260, for a net of +208. Nothing else scores. Passes through the stock are limited rather than penalised: one pass in draw one, three passes in draw three.

Cumulative Vegas is identical except the balance carries forward, so the −52 buy-in applies to each new deal against a running bank rather than a fresh row.

Timed. Standard scoring, minus 2 points for every 10 seconds elapsed, plus a completion bonus of 700,000 ÷ seconds taken if the deal was finished and took at least 30 seconds. Deals finished in under 30 seconds earn no bonus.

Ending the game

The session ends after the agreed number of deals, or when the time limit runs out. Highest total wins. In cumulative Vegas the last row is the total, since the balance never resets.

Common variations

Draw one with unlimited passes is the friendly version; draw three with three passes is the classic Windows default. Thoughtful Klondike deals everything face up. Double Klondike uses two packs and doubles every scoring number above.