How to play Golf Solitaire

Clear all seven columns by playing their cards onto the waste pile, one at a time. Like its namesake, a lower score is better: leftover cards count against you.

Thirty-five cards are dealt face up into seven columns of five. One card is turned up to start the waste pile, and the last sixteen wait face down in the stock.

Play any column's top card onto the waste when it's one rank higher or lower. Suits never matter.
Chain plays together: a 5 on a 6, then a 4, then another 5.
Aces are low and kings are high; the sequence doesn't wrap around.
Stuck? Tap the stock to turn over a new waste card. There's no recycling: sixteen draws is all you get.

Tips

Look for the longest chain before you play; the order you take adjacent cards matters.
Favor plays that free up another playable card underneath.
Save the stock for when you're truly stuck; every draw is a chance you only get once.

Golf is the fastest game on this site to learn and one of the hardest to actually win. There's exactly one rule: play a card from the top of any column onto the waste pile if it's one rank above or one rank below the card already there. That's the whole game. No suits to match, no colors to alternate, no foundations to build in order. Just rank, up or down, one step at a time.

The short rules above tell you what a legal move looks like. This is about the parts that trip people up, the one rule that's easy to get backwards, and how often a deal can actually be won once you sit down and play it properly.

No wraparound, and it matters

Here's the rule that catches almost everyone at least once: the sequence does not wrap around. A king is the highest card and an ace is the lowest, full stop. A king sitting on the waste does not connect to an ace, even though in a lot of other card games high and low cards loop back into each other. In Golf they don't. If the waste shows a king, the only card you can play on it is a queen. If the waste shows an ace, the only card you can play on it is a two.

This is worth remembering early, because the mistake it causes isn't a rules violation, it's a wasted read of the board. You'll spot an ace under a king on the waste and for a second think you've got a play. You don't. Treat ace and king as dead ends on opposite sides of the ladder, not neighbors.

The stock is not a safety net

Unlike Klondike, there's no recycling here. Once you draw a card, it's gone for good, whether you liked it or not. There are only sixteen cards in the stock, which means sixteen shots at unsticking the board for the whole round, full stop. Burn through them early and you'll end up watching a board with two or three playable cards left and nothing in reserve to break it open.

The practical upshot: every column move you can make, make before you draw. If a card in a column is playable right now, playing it costs you nothing and might open up the card underneath. Drawing from the stock costs you one of your sixteen one-shot draws whether the card it reveals helps you or not. Treat the stock like a last resort, not a reflex.

Chains, and why the obvious move isn't always the right one

A single move rarely wins a round of Golf. What wins rounds is stringing several moves together: waste shows a 6, you play a 7, then a 6 from a different column, then a 5, each one opening the next. Before you touch a card, glance across all seven columns for the longest chain you can actually run, not just the first legal play your eye lands on.

This is where Golf gets tactical rather than just fast. Sometimes the card sitting right there, one rank off the waste, isn't the card you should play. If playing it buries a longer chain in another column, take the longer chain first. A short chain now can cost you a long one later, and you don't get the short one back once it's gone.

Prioritize clearing columns that unblock the most cards underneath, especially a column with a single card sitting on top of a run you need. There's no king-only rule for empty columns here like there is in Klondike, but clearing one out fast still matters: every card you free up is one more card that might connect to your next chain instead of sitting dead at the bottom of a pile.

How winnable is Golf, really

We measured this ourselves rather than relying on outside research, because Golf's board never loops back to a position it's already been in: once a card leaves a column for the waste, it never returns, so a solver can exhaustively check every line of play from a fresh deal and know for certain whether a win exists. We ran that solver over the first 500 seeds and found 228 of them, 45.6%, were winnable. The other 264 could not be won by any sequence of moves, no matter how well they were played.

That's under half. It's a real gap from Klondike's roughly 82%, and it's the honest reason Golf feels different in your gut: you can play a clean, mistake-free round and still lose, because the deal itself was never solvable. Full methodology, including how the solver works and why Golf and Pyramid are the two games on this site with an exact measured figure instead of a cited estimate, is in our winnability writeup.

The deals here are seeded and random, the same way every game on this site works, and they are never filtered to be winnable before you see them. Some rounds are lost the moment they're dealt. The hint button will never pretend otherwise: it looks for a move that keeps a winnable deal winnable, and if the deal was never winnable to begin with, no hint can fix that. Golf rewards fast, clean play, but it doesn't owe you a win every time you sit down.