How to play Golf Solitaire

Golf Solitaire is named for the score, not the shape. One deal is a hole, the cards you leave behind are your strokes over par, and a round is nine deals played back to back. Nothing is hidden and nothing is dragged, so the only thing standing between you and a cleared table is the order you take the cards in.

The setup

Seven columns of five cards, all face up, dealt across the row: one card to each column, then a second to each, five times over. Thirty-five cards on the table. The thirty-sixth goes face up beside the deck and starts the waste pile. The last sixteen are the deck.

The card at the near end of a column — the one at the bottom of the screen, overlapping the rest — is that column's front card. Only front cards move, and every column has exactly one until it is empty.

The move

Play any front card whose rank is exactly one higher or one lower than the card showing on the waste. It becomes the new waste card, and the card behind it becomes its column's new front card.

Suits are irrelevant. A red Seven takes a black Six exactly as a black Seven would.

The Ace is low, and it stays low

This is the rule that separates one Golf from another, so it is worth stating flatly: rank does not wrap in this game. An Ace takes a Two and nothing else. A King takes a Queen and nothing else. There is no Ace-on-King and no King-on-Ace.

That one decision changes how many deals are winnable, and by a very large margin. An exhaustive solver run over the first 1,000 seeded deals of this game clears 458 of them, or 45.8%, with perfect play. The same solver, on the same 1,000 deals, with the wrap switched on, clears 928 of them: 92.8%. This game ships without the wrap, because that is the traditional rule and because it is the one that makes the deal itself interesting.

So roughly one deal in two cannot be cleared by anybody — not by you, and not by a program that can see the whole tree at once. That is normal Golf, and it is not a flaw. When you run out of moves the game runs that same solver over the deal you were given and tells you which kind of loss it was, and the Replay button re-deals the identical cards so you can take them in a better order.

Scoring in full

A run is the sequence of table cards you play without turning the deck. The first card of a run scores 10, the second 20, the third 30 — the nth card of a run scores ten times n.

Emptying a column adds 100 on top of the card's own value. Clearing all thirty-five cards adds 500.

The arithmetic is worth internalising, because it changes how the game should be played. A run of eight cards scores 360. Two runs of four score 100 and 100. The same eight cards are worth nearly twice as much taken in one go, and that gap widens the longer the run gets.

The deck

Sixteen cards, turned one at a time, face up onto the waste. There is no redeal and no second pass: once the deck is empty it stays empty.

Turning is always legal while cards remain and it never costs you points directly. What it costs is the run, which resets to zero. A player who taps the deck the moment the obvious move dries up will finish a cleared table with a fraction of the score of a player who found one more card first.

How the game ends

Two ways, and only two. You clear all thirty-five table cards, which wins the deal and pays the 500 bonus. Or no front card is one rank from the waste card and the deck is empty, which ends it where it stands — the cards still on the table are your strokes over par.

Note that an empty deck on its own is not the end. As long as one front card still matches the waste, the game is alive, and a long run off an empty deck is where the biggest scores come from.