Yukon Solitaire: play free online
Yukon Solitaire lays all 52 cards out in seven columns and hands you no stock at all — 31 of them face up, 21 face down, and nothing new ever arrives. Inside the columns you build down in alternating colors, and the four foundations take one suit each, starting from the ace. Whether the deal can be won was settled when it was dealt; the rest is the order you unpick it in.
What it gives back is a freedom few one-deck games do. Look at any long column. The last five cards are face up, and you do not have to move them one at a time. Grab any one of them — a 4 pinned under three unrelated cards is fine — and the whole load riding on it travels with it.
That one rule is most of how to play Yukon Solitaire. Klondike is a game about the stock; this one is a game about digging.
How Yukon Solitaire is dealt
Every card is on the table before you touch anything:
- Tableau: seven columns of 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 cards. Column one holds one card, face up. The other six each show five face-up cards over their buried ones — one face-down card in column two, two in column three, up to six in column seven.
- Foundations: four empty piles above the board, each filled from the ace to the king. Which suit a pile collects is settled by the first ace played onto it, not by the deal.
- No stock and no waste. Every card is dealt at the start, and no card is ever set aside.
How to win at Yukon Solitaire
Every card has to finish on a foundation: four piles, one suit each, the ace at the bottom and the king last. Nothing is missing from the start — the difficulty is the order the deal produced, and how many useful cards are pinned under useless ones.
Yukon Solitaire rules
- Take any face-up card together with everything stacked on it. The moving block does not have to be tidy. Ranks that jump, colors in any order: it all goes.
- Only the card you grabbed has to fit. It lands on an exposed column card one rank higher and of the opposite color — the 9♥️ goes on the 10♠️ or the 10♣️, never on the 10♦️. What it carries is not inspected.
- Only a king may move into an empty column. He does not have to be the exposed card to go: lift a king out of the middle of a pile and the whole train above him moves into the space with him.
- Foundations climb one card at a time, in suit. Ace, then 2, then 3. Only the exposed card at the foot of a column can go up; a block never moves to a foundation in one piece.
- Foundation cards can be recalled. An 8♠️ already sent upstairs comes back into a column whenever that is where a red 7 has to land, so a foundation play made too early is a nuisance rather than a disaster.
- Hidden cards reveal themselves. Clear the last card off a face-down one and it turns over by itself.
- A tap hands the choice to the game, a drag keeps it. Tapping a face-up card sends it, load and all, wherever the game rates best. Drag it if you have a particular column in mind.
- When nothing can move, the deal is finished. No stock exists to shake a new card loose, so the board says No moves available and offers you Undo or a new deal.
Tips and strategy for Yukon Solitaire
- The 21 hidden cards are the whole contest. When two moves look interchangeable, play the one that exposes a new card. You have already seen everything face up, and a buried card counts for nothing until it is freed.
- Dig from the middle of a column. If three face-up cards sit on a hidden one, pick up the deepest of the three — the one resting directly on the hidden card. All three leave together and the card underneath flips.
- Column one costs one move to empty. Find its single card a landing spot and the column is gone; nothing else on the table empties that cheaply. Kings of either color can move into the space, so clearing it pays off here more often than it does in Russian.
- Check that a king can reach the space before you clear it. Nothing else may enter an empty column, so a hole no king can fill is moves spent for nothing.
- Leave the low cards in the tableau. A red 5 in a column is where a black 4 lands. Sending it up early buys one move and costs you several later on.
- Nothing caps Undo, and Yukon is where you want it. With blocks this big a wrong choice shows up three moves later, not at once. Hint will name a move from wherever you have got to.
Russian Solitaire uses this same deal and the same pickup, but builds in suit instead of alternating colors, so every card has one landing spot rather than two. Scorpion Solitaire borrows the pickup as well and drops the foundations entirely — there, each suit is put together inside a column.