Solitaire

The table, and how you win

One standard 52-card deck, no jokers. Seven columns hold 28 cards between them — one card in the first column, seven in the last — and only the top card of each column starts face up. The remaining 24 cards are the stock, and what you turn over from it lands face up on the waste.

Above them sit the four foundations, one per suit. You win when all four are built from ace to king.

• Tableau: the seven columns you work in. Only face-up cards can be moved.
• Stock: the cards you have not seen yet. Tap it to draw.
• Waste: what you have drawn. Only its top card can be moved.
• Foundations: four piles, one per suit, built upwards from the ace.

A card carries its rank in the corner and one suit symbol in the middle, and nothing else. Traditional pip layouts and court-card art were both built and then removed: at the size a column of overlapping cards leaves on a phone, they added density rather than realism. Suits are told apart by shape, with red and black as a second signal rather than the only one.

Controls

• Tap a card you can move and it is selected — every place it may legally go lights up at the same time.
• Tap the destination, a column or a foundation, and the card moves there.
• A face-up run in descending order with alternating colours moves as one: tap its topmost card and the rest comes with it.
• Tap a selected card again and it goes to its foundation if it can. If it cannot, the selection is simply cleared.
• Tap somewhere the card cannot go and the selection moves to whatever movable card is there. An illegal tap is never scolded.
• Tap the stock to draw. When the stock is empty, tapping it turns the waste back over — as many times as you like.

Where a card may go

• Onto a column: one rank lower and the opposite colour. A king, and only a king, can go to an empty column.
• Onto a foundation: the same suit, one rank higher, starting from the ace.
• The top card of a foundation can be taken back into the tableau. That is the standard rule, and it is sometimes the move that saves a deal.
• When the last face-up card leaves a column, the face-down card underneath turns over by itself.

The lit destinations are the rule made visible. If nothing lights up, that card has nowhere to go — which is an answer, not a fault.

Moves, time and the Draw setting

• A move is one card move, one draw from the stock, or one turn of the waste back into the stock.
• Your move count is shown while you play. No clock is shown; the time is recorded and appears on the finish screen and in your statistics.
• Draw 1 and Draw 3 are chosen on the game’s home screen, and the choice applies from the next deal. It never changes a game already in progress, and the daily deal uses whatever is set when you start it.
• There is no score. No Windows-style points, no Vegas scoring, nothing that pays you for speed. Moves and time are the only two numbers, and neither hurries you.

Undo, Hint and finishing the game

Both are unlimited and free, and neither sits behind an ad or a purchase.

• Undo steps back one move at a time and rewinds the move count with it. A card that was turned face up goes back face down, so the board really is the board you had.
• Hint shows one legal move, chosen by a fixed order of preference rather than at random.
• Finish the game appears once the stock and waste are empty and every tableau card is face up. From there the result is already decided, so the app carries the rest to the foundations. Those moves are counted, because they happened.
• How many hints you used is recorded and shown when you finish, as a fact. It is never a cost.

Hint does not promise a win. It names a sound legal move, not a proven path to the end. Water Sort’s hint is a different thing — there a solver really has proved the rest of the board — and each game’s wording says which kind you are being given.

Why some deals cannot be won

Klondike has always had deals that cannot be won, and this one does not filter them out. Screening would mean solving a deal before dealing it, which does not fit in the generation budget of a cheap phone — and a guarantee we cannot keep is worse than the honest version. Minesweeper’s no-guess promise is different because it can be built into the board rather than tested for afterwards.

So your statistics show a real win rate against unscreened deals, and the daily deal can be a losing one too. That is a record, not a fault.

• A retry gives you the same deal, because the deal comes from a seed. Learning where one went wrong and coming back to it is a legitimate way to get better.
• The daily deal is one deal a day, the same for every player, and the last 30 days stay open. Winning one records your move count.
• No streak is counted or shown, so a missed day costs nothing.
• Statistics keep deals played, games won, win rate, your fewest moves and fastest time in a win, and total play time.

Questions people ask