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Solitaire strategy: what works in each game

In Klondike, play the cards on the table before you turn the stock, and turn over face-down cards first. In FreeCell, keep the free cells empty and get a column empty early. In Spider, build in suit, in TriPeaks, pick the card that keeps a run going, and in Pyramid, free the covered cards before you spend their partners.

By Emre Özen, updated October 9, 2026. Every number here comes from our own tests on numbered deals, played by our solvers (which see every card) and by simple players that see only what you'd see. New to a game? Start with the rules of all five.

Klondike

With every card known, our solver won 774 of 1,000 random deals turning one card at a time and 736 turning three. That's the ceiling. Playing blind, the way you do, is where strategy comes in.

Play the table before the stock

We tested two simple players on the same 1,000 deals. Neither looks at a card before it has been turned face up. The first follows the order in our hints: column moves that turn a card over, then the waste card, then the stock. The second turns the stock first and only goes back to the columns once the stock has run out.

Player	Turn one: won	Turn three: won
Columns first (our hint order)	435 (43.5%)	150 (15%)
Stock first	178 (17.8%)	61 (6.1%)
Our solver, seeing every card	774 (77.4%)	736 (73.6%)

Our own test, October 2026. The solver stopped after 200,000 positions on a deal; it gave up on 207 turn-one and 181 turn-three deals, so its rows are a floor.

Columns first won more than twice as often. The reason: the face-down cards in the columns are the only cards you can't reach any other way. The stock will still be there on the next pass. A face-down card under a 6 of clubs won't come out until you move that 6.

Four habits that help

Turn over face-down cards first, and start with the column that has the most of them. The longest columns hide the most cards.
Don't empty a column unless a king is ready to move in. Only a king can fill it, so an empty column with no king to fill it does nothing.
Send cards up when they're safe, not always. A card is safe on its foundation when nothing left could go on it. A red 6 is safe once both black 5s are up. A 4 of hearts you send up too early may be the card a black 3 needed to sit on.
In turn three, plan for the next pass. Playing a card from the waste changes which cards come up next time through. Sometimes it pays to play a waste card just to bring a different card to the top on the next pass.

Try them on our free Klondike solitaire game. Its hints use the same columns-first order.

FreeCell

FreeCell is one of the most winnable of the five. Our solver played all 32,000 deals in the classic numbered set and won 31,988. Since there's nothing hidden, a lost game is almost always a planning problem, and undo is how you learn.

Free cells are worth less than empty columns

How many cards you can move at once depends on empty free cells and empty columns. An empty column doubles the number; a free cell only adds one:

Empty free cells	Empty columns	Cards you can move at once
4	0	5
3	1	8
2	2	12
0	1	2
1	0	2

Worked out from the rule Wikipedia gives: empty cells plus one, doubled for each empty column, onto a column that already has cards.

Find the aces and 2s before your first move. Every card on top of them has to go somewhere.
Treat a free cell as a loan. Each card you park costs you a card of moving room until it leaves. Three full cells leave you moving runs of 2.
Empty a column early. Pick the short column with the fewest high cards. Once it's empty, your move size doubles.
Don't drop a lone card into an empty column if you can help it. Use it for a long run, ideally one headed by a king, so it never has to move again.
Send cards up only when they're safe. In FreeCell a card on a foundation can't come back, so a red 5 sent up too early can strand a black 4.

Practice on our FreeCell game. When the solver finds a win in time, the hint is its first move.

Spider

The number of suits changes everything. Our solver, which sees every card, won 597 of 600 one-suit deals and 271 of 400 two-suit deals. With four suits it finished 1 of 100 within its search limit; it never proved a deal impossible, it ran out of search. Four suits is in a different league.

Turn over face-down cards first. Every one you turn gives you more choices. When two moves look equal, pick the one that uncovers a card.
Build in suit when you can. A 6 of hearts can go on any 7, but only on the 7 of hearts can it later move with the 7. Mixed builds get stuck in place.
Treasure empty columns. An empty column lets you take apart a mixed build: lift the top suit run into it, move the card underneath, then put things back in suit.
Deal only when you've run out of useful moves. Each deal drops a card on every column, burying what you've built. And you can't deal with an empty column, so before you deal, fill it with the card you'll miss least.
Learn on one suit. With one suit, every build is in suit and every run moves. It's the best way to learn when to deal and how to use empty columns before you try two.

Our Spider solitaire game starts on one suit; change it in Settings.

TriPeaks

With every card known, our solver cleared 970 of 1,000 deals and showed the other 30 can't be cleared. A simple player that sees only the face-up cards cleared 370. Its longest run in a game averaged 6.8 cards, and across all 1,000 deals it ended with 1.8 cards left in the peaks on average.

When two cards fit, play the one that uncovers a face-down card. A new face-up card is a new option for the rest of the game.
Follow the chain before you start it. If the waste card is a 7 and you have a 6 and an 8, look at what each leads to. The 8 might lead to a 9 and a 10 you can see; the 6 might lead nowhere.
Remember that kings and aces connect. On a king you can play a queen or an ace.
Check every face-up card before you turn the stock. Each stock card costs 5 points and ends your run, and you only go through the stock once.
Spread your play across the peaks. The bottom row covers all three, and each peak's top card pays a bonus. A peak you ignore can leave its face-down cards locked until the stock runs out.

Put it to work on our TriPeaks solitaire game.

Pyramid

The passes through the stock matter more than anything else. On the same 1,000 deals our solver, seeing every card, won 71 with one pass and 656 with 3 passes, which is how our game plays. A simple player that sees only the free cards and takes the pair that uncovers the most cleared the pyramid itself in 329 games, 124 of them full wins.

Take kings at once. A king never pairs, so removing it costs nothing.
Free the covered cards before spending their partners. Each rank has only four cards, and every 7 needs a 6. Say three 7s come from the stock and you pair each one with a free 6. If the last 6 is lying on top of the last 7, neither can ever come off.
Watch for dead cards. If every card still left that could pair with a card is lying on top of it or under it, that card can never come off and the deal is lost. Our solver checks for this to cut its search short.
Pair stock cards with each other when you can. The turned card and the top waste card can pair together, which saves pyramid cards for each other.
Learn the stock on your first pass. When you turn the waste back over, the cards come back in the same order. Whatever you saw on the first pass tells you what's coming on the second.

Ready to try? Play our Pyramid solitaire game.

How we tested

Each game has a solver that sees every card and searches for a win, with a limit on how many positions it looks at per deal. When it runs out, we count the deal as not won, never as impossible. The simple players use only cards you would have seen, and they follow the same rules as our hints. Our "winnable deals only" setting uses the solver instead: every deal it hands out is one the solver won. The deals are numbered, so we can run the same tests again whenever the games change.