Solitaire

Solitaire — Klondike, to give it its proper name — is the card game that came with every office computer for two decades. One standard 52-card deck, seven tableau columns, four foundation piles and a stock to draw from. Move every card to the foundations, ace through king by suit, and you have won.

Roughly four out of five Klondike deals are winnable in theory, but a good share of those still get lost through a single early misstep. The tension is that many moves are technically legal and quietly wrong: emptying a column with nothing to put in it, or burying a card you needed two moves later.

Both draw modes are here. Draw 1 turns one card at a time and is much more forgiving. Draw 3 turns three and only lets you play the top one, which is the traditional and considerably harder version.

1. Seven columns are dealt with one to seven cards, the last of each face up. The rest form the stock.
2. Build columns downward in alternating colours — a red 9 goes on a black 10. You can move a whole ordered run at once, not just one card.
3. Build the four foundations upward by suit starting from the ace. Once a card is on a foundation you can leave it there.
4. Turning over the last face-down card in a column flips it automatically. Only a king can move into a completely empty column.
5. Click the stock to draw. When it runs out, click again to recycle the waste pile and go through it once more — there is no limit on passes.
6. Get all 52 cards onto the foundations to win. Your best result is scored on moves and stored separately for each draw mode.

Tap to select, tap to place. Click or tap a card to pick it up — it lifts with an orange outline — then click the column or foundation you want it on. Tapping the selected card again puts it back down. This works identically with a mouse and on touch, so nothing is lost on a phone.

Double-click or double-tap a card to send it straight to a foundation if it will go there. This is much faster than aiming at four small piles.

Undo steps back through your last eighty moves, including stock draws. Auto-finish repeatedly sends every card it legally can to the foundations — use it once the hard work is done rather than clicking fifty times.

• Turn face-down cards over before anything else. Hidden cards are the only real unknown; a move that reveals one is almost always better than a move that does not.
• Do not rush aces to the foundations. Low cards on the foundation cannot come back, and you often need a 2 or 3 to receive a card later. Send them up when they stop being useful below.
• Think before emptying a column. An empty column is powerful, but only if you have a king ready. Otherwise you have just lost a working space.
• On draw 3, count the cycle. The same cards come round in the same order, so note which useful card sits second or third in a group — playing one card ahead of it changes what you can reach.
• Prefer moves from the tableau over moves from the waste. Waste cards will come round again; a tableau move may not be available later.