About Solitaire
This is Klondike, the patience most people simply call solitaire: seven
columns dealt face down with one card turned up on each, a stock of
twenty-four, and four foundations to be built from ace to king, one suit
apiece. On the table you build down in alternating colours — a red six
on a black seven — and a run built that way moves as one. An empty
column takes only a king. Get every card home and the game is yours.
There is one deal every day at midnight UTC, the same one for everybody.
The stock turns a card at a time and you can go through it as often as
you like, so every card in it is yours sooner or later — what is hard is
the seven columns, and the twenty-one cards lying face down in them.
Every deal can be won. About one game of Klondike in
five is lost at the shuffle, before a card is moved, and a daily that
hands one of those out has wasted a morning nobody gets back. So each
deal is played through by a solver that can see every card, and only a
deal it wins is served. That proves a win exists, not that it is easy to
find with the cards face down — which is the game.
Undo takes back as much as you like, with one
exception: a move that turned a face-down card over. Turning a card and
then taking it back would let you look under every card on the table
before committing to anything, and a Klondike you can do that in is not
an easier Klondike, it is one with no hidden cards. Past that wall the
way back is Deal again, which lays out the same deal
from the start. You keep whatever you remember.
The usual advice holds: turn over face-down cards before anything else,
empty a column only when there is a king waiting for it, and do not rush
cards to the foundations that you may still need to build on. When every
card is face up and the stock is spent the rest go home on their own.
Progress is kept where you left it, and a shared result links to a card
whose move count was replayed, move by move, on the day's deal.