🂡Play Solitaire

Klondike is the game almost everyone means when they say solitaire, largely because it shipped with a certain desktop operating system in 1990 and quietly became the most played computer game in history. It was included to teach people how to use a mouse; the drag-and-drop was the actual lesson.

This is the draw-one variant, which is the friendlier of the two — you see every card in the deck in order rather than only every third one. Depending on the deal, somewhere around eighty percent of draw-one games are winnable with perfect play, though human players typically win closer to a third of them.

Most losses come from the same mistake: playing cards to the foundations too early. An ace on the tableau is dead weight, but a four or five is a landing spot that lets you unstack a column and reach the face-down cards underneath. Once a card is home it cannot come back, so every foundation move is a door closing.

Moves are the score here and lower is better, so the game rewards thinking rather than clicking. Auto-finish will sweep every card that can go home once the board is unpicked.