Ultimate Book of Card Games: The Comprehensive Guide to More Than 350 Games (18 page)

At the risk of inciting a heated debate, we are using the most common American version of Solitaire—generally known as Klondike—as the “basic” or standard version of the game. This is likely to upset more than one group of passionate players who claim their version of Solitaire is the true, original, and authentic version of the game. However, once you master Klondike, you are ready to play nearly every other version of Solitaire. The odds of winning Klondike are about 1 in every 30 hands.

HOW TO DEAL
Shuffle a fifty-two-card deck, and deal twenty-eight cards into seven piles like this: one card to the first pile, two cards to the second pile, three cards to the third pile, etc., until you have seven piles. All cards are dealt face down, except for the last or topmost card in each pile, which is turned up. So the first pile consists of just one card turned face up.

Traditionalists argue you should deal one card at a time to each pile; modernists prefer to deal out each pile completely before moving on to the next. Either way, the opening layout should look something like this:

After dealing, set aside all remaining cards, face down, in a single pile. This is your
stock pile
.

WINNING
Klondike is difficult to win—the odds are less than 4 percent (about 1 in 30 hands). The goal is to rearrange your seven piles of random cards into four new piles, called foundations, organized by suit (spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs), and within each suit by rank from low to high (A-2-3-4-5-6- 7-8-9-10-J-Q-K).

Each pile must contain all thirteen cards of its appropriate suit. More often than not, you end up swallowing the bitter pill of defeat, having exhausted all moving and building options and turning up your final stock cards.

HOW TO PLAY
Klondike, like most Solitaire games, has five distinct “plays” or moves: building cards within the tableau (your original seven piles); promoting an exposed ace above the board to start a new foundation pile; removing cards from the main board to an appropriate (suited) ace foundation above the board; moving kings to occupy any vacant slots in your original seven piles; and, when all else fails, drawing a card from your stock pile. Each play is described below.

BUILDING
Once all cards are dealt, start by moving one card onto another that is higher in rank and of the opposite color. This is called
building
. In the tableau below, for example, you may build 10 of spades on J of hearts. You may not build Q of diamonds on K of hearts (they’re both red) or 6 of spades on 7 of clubs (they’re both black).

Any time you expose a face-down card, turn it up. In the example below, after building 10 of spades on J of hearts, there was a face-down card below 10 of spades, the Q of clubs. You may build that Q of clubs on K of hearts, and then build the existing J of hearts-10 of spades set on top of that! All face-up cards on a pile may be moved as a single unit, as long as the suit-matching and ranking rules are followed.

FOUNDATIONS
In Klondike and most other Solitaire games, when you encounter an exposed ace, you move it to a new row above the original tableau (see illustration below). This allows you to begin building the four piles, or foundations, that you need to win the game. Keep in mind there is no requirement to immediately promote an exposed ace—sometimes it makes sense to wait a turn a two before promoting an ace.

BUILDING ON THE FOUNDATIONS
Once you create an ace foundation, start building cards of the same suit in
ascending
order. This is how you win (or more often lose!) a game of Klondike. So in the example above, you may build 2 of diamonds and then 3 of diamonds onto A of diamonds. Just remember that once you move an ace up or start building on an ace foundation, you may not reuse or replay these cards. Once played to the foundations, a card stays on the foundations.

FILING VACANT TABLEAU SLOTS
When one of your original tableau piles is vacant (typically because you have built its cards onto other tableau piles or to
the foundations), you are allowed to move any king into the vacant slot. As with promoting aces, there is no requirement to immediately move a king into an empty slot. Do so at your leisure. However, if a king has cards already built on it, you must move the entire pile of cards as a single unit to the new slot.