Golf Solitaire

About this game

Golf Solitaire is the fastest deal in the patience family. Thirty-five cards are dealt face up into seven columns of five, one card starts the waste pile beside a sixteen-card deck, and every front card that is one rank higher or lower than the waste card can be taken with a single tap. There is nothing to drag, no foundations to build, no hidden cards to hope for — the whole deal is visible from the first second, and a game is usually decided inside ninety seconds. That is why people play twenty of them rather than one. Rank is all that matters. A red Seven takes a black Six exactly as a black Seven would, and suits never enter into it. The Ace is low and it stays low: it takes a Two and nothing else, and a King takes a Queen and nothing else. There is no Ace-on-King wrap here, which is the traditional rule and also the reason a Golf deal is a genuine gamble. Measured with an exhaustive solver over the first 1,000 seeded deals, 45.8% of them can be cleared with perfect play. Turn the wrap on and the same 1,000 deals go to 92.8% — a different, much softer game. This one keeps the teeth. What turns a legal move into a good one is the run. Cards played back to back without turning the deck score an escalating bonus: the first is worth ten points, the second twenty, the third thirty, so a seven-card run is worth two hundred and eighty on its own. Turning the deck is always allowed and never costs points directly, but it resets the run to zero, and that is the real price of giving up on a position. Emptying a column pays a hundred; clearing all thirty-five pays five hundred more. Every deal is seeded, so every deal can be replayed and shared. When a game ends with cards still on the table, Golf Solitaire runs the same exhaustive solver over the deal you were given and tells you whether it was clearable at all — and the Replay button hands you the identical cards so you can take them in a better order. Unlimited undo restores the board, the score and the run counter exactly, so an experiment never costs you a game.

Controls

Tap or click the front card of any column to play it onto the waste. Tap the deck to turn a new card.

Keyboard

• 1 to 7 play the front card of that column.
• Arrow keys move between columns, Enter or Space plays the focused card.
• D turn the deck, U undo, R replay the same deal, N new deal.

How to play

Clear all thirty-five table cards by playing them onto the waste, one rank higher or one rank lower each time.

What you can take

• Only the front card of a column can move — the one nearest the bottom of the screen.
• Suit never matters, so a red Seven takes a black Six or a black Eight.
• The Ace is low and does not wrap: an Ace takes only a Two, a King takes only a Queen.
• Turn the deck when you are stuck. It holds sixteen cards and there is no redeal.

Run scoring

• The first card played without turning the deck scores 10, the second 20, the third 30 — the nth card scores 10 x n.
• Emptying a column adds 100, and clearing all thirty-five cards adds 500.
• You are stuck when no front card matches the waste and the deck is empty.

Read the full Golf Solitaire rules and strategy →