Klondike solitaire
| A patience game | |
| Alternative names | Solitaire, seven up, sevens |
|---|---|
| Named variants | Agnes |
| Family | Klondike-like |
| Deck | Single 52-card |
| See also Glossary of solitaire terms | |
Klondike is a patience game (solitaire card game). In the U.S. and Canada, Klondike is known as solitaire, being one of the better known of the family of patience games. The game rose to fame in the late 19th century, being named "Klondike" after the Canadian region where a gold rush happened. It is rumored that the game was either created or popularized by the prospectors in Klondike.
Klondike is played with a standard 52-card deck, without Jokers. After shuffling, seven piles of cards are laid from left to right. Each pile begins with one upturned card. From left to right, each pile contains one more card than the last. The first and left-most pile contains a single upturned card, the second pile contains two cards (one downturned, one upturned), the third contains three (two downturned, one upturned), and so on, until the seventh pile which contains seven cards (six downturned, one upturned). The piles should look like the figure to the right at the beginning of every game.
The four foundations (light rectangles in the upper right of the figure) are built up by suit from Ace (low in this game) to King, and the tableau piles can be built down by alternate colors, and partial or complete piles can be moved if they are built down by alternate colors also. Any empty piles can be filled with a King or a pile of cards with a King. The aim of the game is to build up a stack of cards starting with two and ending with King, all of the same suit. Once this is accomplished, the goal is to move this to a foundation, where the player has previously placed the Ace of that suit. Once the player has done this, they will have "finished" that suit, the goal being to finish all suits, at which time the player would have won. There are different ways of dealing the remainder of the deck:
For a standard game of Klondike, drawing three cards at a time and placing no limit on the number of re-deals, the number of possible hands is over 8×1067, or an 8 followed by 67 zeros. About 79% of the games are theoretically winnable, but in practice, human players do not win 79% of games played, due to wrong moves that cause the game to become unwinnable. If one allows cards from the foundation to be moved back to the tableau, then between 82% and 91.5% are theoretically winnable. Note that these results depend on complete knowledge of the positions of all 52 cards, which a player does not possess. Another recent study has found the Draw 3, Re-Deal Infinite to have a 83.6% win rate after 1000 random games were solved by a computer solver. The issue is that a wrong move cannot be known in advance whenever more than one move is possible. The number of games a player can probabilistically expect to win is at least 43%. In addition, some games are "unplayable" in which no cards can be moved to the foundations even at the start of the game; these occur in only 0.025% of hands dealt.
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