How to Play Solitaire: Rules for Every Major Variant

Solitaire isn't one game — it's a family of over 150 documented patience games, most played with a single standard 52-card deck. This page covers the rules, mechanics, and strategic decision points for the major variants: Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, and Pyramid. Understanding how these differ — and where the real choices live — separates players who win occasionally from players who win reliably.

Definition and scope

Solitaire refers to any card game designed for a single player. The term "patience," still preferred in British English, captures the spirit accurately: most variants involve arranging cards into ordered sequences according to fixed rules, with no opponent other than the shuffle.

The standard 52-card deck — four suits, thirteen ranks, no jokers — forms the basis of nearly every solitaire variant. Some versions, like Spider in its hardest setting, use two full decks (104 cards). The goal across variants is broadly similar: reorganize a dealt tableau into complete, ordered sequences. The rules governing how that reorganization happens are where the games diverge dramatically.

How it works

Klondike is the variant most people mean when they say "solitaire." Seven tableau columns hold cards dealt face-down, with one face-up card on each column. Four foundation piles must be built up by suit from Ace to King. The stock pile — the remaining 24 cards — can be cycled through either one card at a time (easier) or three cards at a time (the traditional challenge). Winning rate on random deals is approximately 79% when optimal play is applied to the turn-one variant, according to analysis published by the Solitaire research community at the University of Michigan.

Spider Solitaire is played with 104 cards across 10 tableau columns. The goal is to assemble 8 complete in-suit sequences (Ace through King) and remove them from the table. Spider comes in three difficulty settings:

  1. One-suit — all cards treated as the same suit; beginner-friendly
  2. Two-suit — two suits in play; moderate difficulty
  3. Four-suit — full deck complexity; roughly 1 in 3 deals are winnable with perfect play

FreeCell uses all 52 cards dealt face-up across 8 columns. Four "free cells" act as temporary holding spaces, and 4 foundations build up by suit from Ace to King. Because the entire layout is visible from the first move, FreeCell is almost entirely a game of planning rather than luck. Microsoft's FreeCell implementation assigned deal numbers 1 through 32,000; deal number 11,982 is one of only a small handful considered unsolvable.

Pyramid pairs cards that sum to 13 (King = 13, Queen = 12, Jack = 11, Ace = 1) and removes them from a pyramid-shaped layout of 28 cards. The three-card stock cycles until exhausted or until the pyramid is cleared.

Common scenarios

Klondike mid-game deadlock — The most common failure: all accessible cards are buried in the tableau with no moves available from the stock. Avoid this by prioritizing moves that expose face-down cards in long columns rather than building foundations prematurely.

Spider column depletion — Clearing an entire column in Spider creates an empty space, which can hold any sequence. Empty columns are effectively the most powerful resource in Spider; giving one up casually for a short-term sequence is a decision that loses games.

FreeCell free-cell saturation — Using all 4 free cells simultaneously creates a near-gridlock condition. Experienced players rarely hold more than 2 cards in free cells at once, treating the third as emergency-only and the fourth as a signal the game may already be lost.

Decision boundaries

The sharpest contrast across variants sits between luck-dominated and skill-dominated games. Klondike (three-card draw) involves genuine randomness because the stock ordering is hidden; FreeCell, with its fully visible layout, is almost entirely deterministic. This places them at opposite ends of a spectrum that matters when choosing a variant to study seriously — see card game strategy fundamentals for a broader treatment of this skill-luck axis.

Key decision rules by variant:

Solitaire variants also differ in replay value and cognitive load — topics explored further at cards and cognitive benefits. Players new to card games in general may find learning card games as a beginner a useful complement to the specific rules here, while the full landscape of single-player and multiplayer options is catalogued on the site index.

References