About Free Printable Solitaire (Klondike) Rules
Free printable Klondike Solitaire rules — the classic single-player patience game. Setup, turn flow, Turn-1 vs Turn-3 draws, scoring, winning, and variants. Full color or ink-saver black & white. No signup, no watermark.
How to use
- Choose your print style. Full color renders the playing-card diagrams with classic red and black suits — great as a reference poster beside your card table. Ink-saver (black & white) switches to monochrome suits for a cheap classroom or family handout.
- Choose whether to show card diagrams. Diagrams on (the default) includes the starting layout (stock, waste, four foundation slots, seven tableau columns), foundation-up vs tableau-down direction figures, a Turn-1 vs Turn-3 draw comparison, and three legal-move panels.
- Read the preview to confirm the layout — rules flow from the objective through setup, turn-by-turn play, special rules (alternating-colour build, Kings-only for empty columns, Turn-1 vs Turn-3, redeals, auto-complete), scoring (Standard and Vegas), winning, and three common variants.
- Click Print Rules to print or save as PDF. The illustrated guide prints cleanly across one or two letter / A4 pages; choose Text only for a one-page summary you can keep beside the deck.
Frequently asked questions
How do you set up Klondike Solitaire?
Shuffle a standard 52-card deck (no Jokers) and deal 28 cards into 7 tableau piles from left to right — pile 1 gets 1 card, pile 2 gets 2 cards, up to pile 7 with 7 cards. Turn the top card of every pile face up; the rest stay face down. Place the remaining 24 cards face down as the stock at upper left, leave a space beside it for the waste pile, and reserve four empty slots above the tableau for the foundations — one per suit, each built upward from Ace to King.
What is the difference between Turn-1 and Turn-3 Solitaire?
In Turn-1 (Draw-1), you flip the top card of the stock one at a time onto the waste pile — every drawn card is immediately playable, in order. In Turn-3 (Draw-3), you flip three cards face-up at once and only the top card of the trio can be played; the two cards beneath only become accessible after the top one is moved. Turn-3 is the traditional Bicycle/Hoyle default and is significantly harder — algorithmic studies (via Wikipedia) put Turn-1 near 52% with optimal play versus about 18% for Turn-3, while one experiment found a skilled human player won about 43% of Turn-3 games (Yan/Diaconis).
How do you win at Klondike Solitaire?
You win when all four foundations are complete — Ace through King in each of the four suits, for 52 cards total. The game is lost when the stock has been exhausted (per your variant's redeal limit) and there are no legal tableau, waste-to-tableau, or foundation moves remaining. Once every card in the deck is face up the game can be completed mechanically, which is why many digital versions auto-complete from that point.
What can fill an empty column in Solitaire?
Only a King — alone or as the top of a valid descending alternating-colour sequence — may fill a tableau column that has been completely cleared. Lower cards may never start a new column. This is one of the most important strategic constraints in Klondike: emptying a column is only useful if you have (or will soon expose) a King to occupy it.
How does Vegas Solitaire scoring work?
Vegas Klondike is played for points or money. You earn $5 for every card moved to the foundations against a buy-in: classical Vegas (per Wikipedia/Hoyle) uses a $50 buy-in with break-even at 10 cards; many modern apps use a $52 buy-in ($1 per card) with break-even at 11 cards. You take a single pass through the stock — no redeals — so most deals end in a net loss. A perfect game returns $260 — net about +$210 against the $50 buy-in, +$208 against the $52 buy-in.
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