Klondike Solitaire Turn 3

Details

• In this classic patience game, you are given a deck of 52 standard playing cards, and your task is to move all of them to four foundations at the top right corner by suit from Ace to King.
• The game starts with seven tableau columns containing an ascending number of downturned cards from left to right.
• One upturned card is dealt to the top of each tableau column, then three upturned cards will be dealt to the discard stack and the remaining downturned cards become the stock, which is placed at the top left corner next to the discard stack.
• The four foundations are initially left empty.
• Before moving to the foundations, the cards can be placed on the tableau piles.
• The topmost card on the discard stack can be dragged to a tableau column if the topmost one on the tableau pile is an alternate color and an immediately higher rank, for example, the 6 of clubs can be dragged to the top of the 7 of diamonds or the 7 of hearts.

The goal

• The aim of the game in klondike solitaire is to build all four suits up from Ace to King in separate piles at the top right corner.

Background

• In England this one player card game is known as patience, while Solitaire is the American name. There are more kinds of single player solitaire than all other card games together. The most popular solitaires are klondike, freecell, spider, golf, pyramid and yukon. There are plenty of other styles of the game with names like accordian, clock, colorado, florentine solitaire, flower garden, labyrinth, penguin and triple peaks solitaire. Often, a group of friends or family or players in a geographical area will come up with their own rules. There is a detailed history of the game here at Dave Parlett's Historic Card Games. He asks the question Is Patience really a game or merely a glorified puzzle? "Game" normally implies some form of competition between players, which of course is absent from a solitary pursuit. Yet Patience involves more physical activity than is normally associated with "puzzle", and actually feels more like a game than the so-called game of Solitaire in which you gradually eliminate thirty-six marbles from a pattern of holes by jump and capture. Like other one-player games, this type of Solitaire is better counted as a puzzle, since it has just one solution (or set of solutions), which only has to be memorized or written down to render future playings pointless - except perhaps as a form of therapy, or as a true test of "patience" in the virtuous sense of the word. Like other puzzles, it ceases to be a puzzle once solved.