Golf Solitaire — free online card game, no download

Thirty-five cards stand in seven columns of five, every one face up, and a single card sits in the tray. You may take the bottom card of any column whose rank is one above or one below that tray card — suits never matter. The card you take becomes the new tray card, so one move sets up the next, and a good deal unravels in a single long run. When nothing fits, you turn a card from the stock, and when the stock runs dry the deal is over.

The score is simply how many cards you leave behind, which means nought is a perfect clearance and every deal gives you a number to beat rather than a bare win or loss. A round takes a minute or two. It is free, it runs in the browser with nothing to install, and unlike Klondike there is no hidden information anywhere on the table: every card is visible from the deal, so a round you lose is a round you misplayed.

How to play

• Tap the bottom card of a column if it is one rank above or below the tray card. Suits are irrelevant.
• Aces do not wrap. An Ace joins only a 2, and a King joins only a Queen — there is no King-to-Ace step.
• Tap the stock to turn a fresh card when you are stuck. You get one pass through it and no redeal.
• The deal ends when the stock is empty and no column can move. Your score is the cards still standing, so lower is better and 0 clears the table.
• On a desktop, keys 1–7 play a column and Space turns the stock.

Why Aces and Kings decide the game

Every rank in this game has two neighbours — a 7 accepts a 6 or an 8 — with two exceptions. Because there is no wrap, an Ace only ever follows a 2, and a King only ever follows a Queen. Those eight cards are half as playable as the other forty-four, and they are the single biggest reason a deal stalls with cards still on the table. If an Ace or a King is sitting near the bottom of a column, it is not a card you will "get to later" — later is exactly when the 2s and Queens have all gone.

That gives you a concrete priority order. When two moves are legal and you have no other reason to prefer one, take the one that uncovers an Ace or a King, or the one that spends a 2 or a Queen against a column that is holding one. Spending a Queen on empty air is how a King becomes permanent.

The second habit is not to strip a column just because you can. A column you empty gives you nothing back — there is no refill in this game — while a column you leave one card deep is a live option for later. Long runs come from having several different ranks available at once, and seven columns each showing a different card is a far better position than three columns dug halfway to the floor. It is the same reasoning as keeping a spare seven in TriPeaks, and it is the difference between clearing twenty cards and clearing all thirty-five.

Worth knowing before you judge a deal: across four thousand simulated deals, a player who simply takes the leftmost legal card every time leaves a median of nine cards standing and clears the whole table only about one deal in a hundred. Playing well — digging the deepest column and refusing to empty one — moves the median to seven and roughly triples the clearance rate to three in a hundred. So a clean sweep is genuinely rare and worth chasing, and a deal that leaves you five or six is already a good one.

Finally, count the stock. You get sixteen turns and no more, and each one ends whatever run you were on. Turning a card is not free even though it costs no score — it costs you a card you might have needed a move later. Players who finish clean tend to be the ones who look at all seven columns before spending a single stock card, not the ones who play fastest.

More games

The other card games: Pyramid Solitaire, TriPeaks Solitaire, FreeCell and Klondike. Or browse all games.