Is Klondike Solitaire Always Winnable?

Short answer: no. If you shuffle a deck at random and deal Klondike, some deals have no winning line at all, and others are winnable only if you can see the face-down cards. This page explains what that means for you and what Solitaire Play does about it.

Why some deals cannot be won

Klondike hides 21 of its 28 starting tableau cards. After a random shuffle, the cards you need first can end up buried under cards that can never be moved out of the way. When that happens, no sequence of moves wins, however well you play.

Even when a winning line exists, finding it from the face-up position is harder than finding it with every card visible, so you will lose some deals that could have been won.

What Solitaire Play does

For Turn 1, Turn 3 and the Daily Challenge, new games are drawn only from deals that our solver has already won, and each winning line was replayed move by move to check it. A lost game there is a missed line, not bad luck.

Vegas is the exception: it limits how often you can go through the stock, and our library was proved without that limit, so Vegas games use random deals and carry no promise.

Checking a game in progress

Open the menu and choose Solver to ask whether your current position can still be won, to see a winning line, or to go back to an earlier position that is still winnable. If the solver gives no answer, that is not a verdict: its search has a limit, so it cannot tell a lost position from a hard one.

For the figures from our own solver runs, see Klondike Turn 1 vs Turn 3: win rate numbers.

Frequently asked questions