How to play Solitaire (Klondike): rules and your first win
When people say “Solitaire” they almost always mean Klondike, the one that shipped with Windows and that your relatives have played a thousand times. The rules are simple once someone lays them out plainly, which nobody ever does. This guide does exactly that: what the piles are, which moves are legal, and the order to make them in so your very first game actually has a chance of finishing. You can play Solitaire on Melio for free while you read, with no signup.
The board: what every pile is for
Klondike uses a single 52-card deck and lays it out into four areas. Get these names straight now and the rest of the game makes sense immediately.
- The tableau is the main playing area: seven columns of cards across the middle of the board. This is where most of the work happens.
- The stockis the face-down pile in the corner, the cards you didn’t deal into the tableau. You draw from it when you run out of moves.
- The waste (sometimes called the talon) is the small face-up pile next to the stock, where drawn cards land. The top card of the waste is always playable.
- The four foundations are the empty slots across the top, one per suit. Filling all four, ace through king, is how you win.
The initial deal is the one part people get wrong. You deal seven columns of increasing size: the first column gets one card, the second gets two, and so on up to seven in the last column. In every column, only the bottomcard (the one nearest you) is turned face up. Everything above it stays face down for now. The 24 cards you didn’t deal become the stock.
The goal: all 52 cards on the foundations
You win when every card has been moved up to the foundations. Each foundation holds one suit and is built up in order: the ace first, then the 2, the 3, and so on through the 10, jack, queen, and king. So the hearts foundation goes ace of hearts, 2 of hearts, 3 of hearts, all the way to the king of hearts, and the same for spades, diamonds, and clubs.
That is the entire objective. Everything else, the tableau shuffling and the drawing from the stock, exists only to feed those four piles in the right order.
Legal moves in the tableau
The tableau is where you maneuver cards into position. Two rules govern it.
Build down in alternating colors. You can place a card on a tableau column only if it is one rank lower than the card it lands on and the opposite color. Red goes on black, black goes on red. So a black 6 (spades or clubs) can land on a red 7 (hearts or diamonds). A red 9 can land on a black 10. Color is what matters, not suit: a 6 of clubs and a 6 of spades are interchangeable for this purpose because both are black.
You can move ordered runs as a group. If you already have a valid sequence sitting in a column, say a red 8, black 7, red 6 stacked in alternating colors, you can pick up the whole run and move it onto a black 9 in one action. You do not have to move cards one at a time as long as the run is already correctly ordered.
Only a king fills an empty column.When a tableau column is emptied out, the only card you may move into that blank space is a king (or a valid run that starts with a king). This is the single rule beginners forget most, and it’s why emptying a column carelessly can leave you with a useless gap.
Flipping cards and sending them up
Two more moves complete the picture.
Face-down cards flip when exposed. Whenever you move the face-up card off the bottom of a column, the face-down card now sitting at the bottom turns over and becomes playable. Uncovering these hidden cards is the engine of the whole game, because every face-down card you flip is new information and a new option.
Send cards to the foundations by suit, in order. As soon as an ace is exposed (in the tableau or on top of the waste), it can go straight up to start its foundation. After an ace is up, its 2 can follow, then the 3, and so on. A card can only go to a foundation if it is the next rank up for that suit. On Melio you can tap a face-up card to send it to its foundation automatically when the move is legal.
The stock: drawing when you’re stuck
Sooner or later you run out of moves in the tableau. That is what the stock is for. Tap (or click) the stock to deal cards into the waste, and play the top waste card just like any other face-up card. When the stock runs empty, recycling it turns the waste back into a fresh stock so you can cycle through again.
There are two ways the draw works, and Melio lets you pick:
- Draw 1 turns over a single card at a time. Every card in the stock becomes reachable on its own turn, which makes the game more forgiving. This is the friendlier mode for learning.
- Draw 3 turns over three cards at once, and only the top of those three is immediately playable. It is the traditional, harder version, because reaching a buried card takes planning and several cycles through the stock.
If you are just starting out, set Melio to draw 1, learn the flow, and switch to draw 3 once you want a sterner challenge.
The order of operations for your first win
Knowing the rules is not the same as knowing what to do first. Here is a reliable sequence to work through on every game.
- Get the aces and 2s up immediately. Any ace you can see should go to a foundation, and any 2 of a suit whose ace is already up should follow. These are always safe to play.
- Prioritize flipping face-down cards.Among your tableau options, prefer the move that uncovers a hidden card. A move that turns over a new card is almost always better than a move that just shuffles two face-up cards around, because it gives you something you didn’t have before.
- Use the waste before recycling the stock. Draw from the stock to find cards that let you uncover more of the tableau, and play useful waste cards as they come up rather than blowing through the whole stock at once.
- Be careful about emptying a column. A blank column is valuable, but only if you have a king ready to fill it. Do not strip a column bare and then sit on a useless gap.
The one habit that separates a finished game from a stuck one: do not rush cards to the foundations. It is tempting to send every eligible card up the moment it qualifies, but a low card sitting in the tableau is often the only thing that lets you park an opposite-colored card on it. If you fire a red 5 up to the foundation too early, you may have nowhere to place a black 4 later. Send cards up freely when they are clearly no longer needed below, and hold them when they might still catch a card. When in doubt, leave it down a little longer.
Playing it on Melio
Melio Solitaire keeps the controls out of your way. Tap a face-up card to pick it up, then tap where it should go, the board only accepts legal landings, so you cannot make an illegal move by accident. Tap a card on its own and Melio will send it straight to a foundation when that move is available. The stock advances with a tap and recycles when it’s empty.
Two things make it a good place to learn. You choose draw 1 or draw 3 before you start, so you can ease in on the easier mode. And there is full undo: every move can be taken back, which means you can experiment, see what a move opens up, and reverse it if it leads nowhere. That undo button is the fastest way to build an intuition for which moves help and which ones trap you.