Yukon Solitaire — free online card game, no download

Yukon is Klondike with the deck taken away. All 52 cards go onto the table at the start, seven columns deep, and there is no stock and no waste — nothing to draw, nothing to recycle, and no luck left after the deal. In exchange you get one rule Klondike does not have: any face-up card may be moved along with every card sitting on top of it, whether or not they are in sequence. You are not moving neat runs; you are moving heaps.

The goal is unchanged. Build the four foundations from Ace to King, one suit each, and the deal is won when all 52 are up there. Empty columns take a King, again with its whole pile. Because everything you need is either visible or under one known card, a lost deal is nearly always a planning mistake rather than bad luck — which is exactly what makes it worth replaying. Free, no download, unlimited undo, and a part-finished deal is saved if you close the tab.

How to play

• Tap any face-up card to move it. Everything stacked on it comes along, in sequence or not.
• A card lands on one of the opposite colour and one rank higher, or on a foundation if it is the only card being moved.
• If that was not the spot you wanted, tap the same card again to send it to its next legal home.
• Empty columns take a King — and the pile on top of it.
• Uncovering a face-down card turns it over automatically.
• Undo is unlimited and free. Once no cards are face down, AUTO finishes the deal for you.

Why Yukon is winnable when Klondike is not

Klondike deals turn on the stock: the card you need may be three deals down a pile you can only cycle in one direction, and there are hands nobody could win. Yukon has no stock at all, so almost every deal is solvable with the right sequence of moves. The figure usually quoted for Yukon is that around four deals in five go out with perfect play. Measured against this page's own engine, a bot that always plays the move exposing the most face-down cards wins only 5.4% of 500 deals. That gap between 5% and 80% is the game: almost every deal can be won, and almost none of them can be won by grabbing.

The strategy follows from the rule. Because a card carries its whole pile, a low card buried under six others is not stuck at all — you move the six with it. That means the thing worth counting is not how tidy your columns look but how many face-down cards are left. Every move that turns one over is worth more than a move that builds a pretty run, and a move that buries a card you have not exposed yet is usually a mistake.

The one real trap is emptying a column with no King to fill it. An empty column in Yukon is enormously valuable, because it accepts a King and its entire pile in one move, and that single move often unlocks half the board. Emptying one before you have a King to put in it hands the space back to the first pile that needs somewhere to go. If you like the shape of this, Klondike is the version with a stock, FreeCell is the one where every deal is winnable by construction, and Spider is the long game.

More games

More from 🃏 Card & solitaire games:

• Cribbage — Throw two to your crib, peg to thirty-one, then count the show. One deal at a time.
• Speed — No turns at all. Both of you play at once, one rank up or down, until someone runs out.
• Solitaire — Classic Klondike, built for one hand: tap a card and it moves itself. Undo, auto-finish, and your best time saved.
• FreeCell — Every card face up from the start, so there's no luck left to blame. Four free cells and a clock.
• Spider Solitaire — One suit, ten columns, eight runs to build. Make an empty column early or you'll wish you had.

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