How to play Russian Solitaire

Build all four foundations from ace to king, each in its own suit.

Yukon layout: column 1 holds one face-up card; each later column adds one more face-down card under five face up. The entire deck is dealt; there is no stock.

Any face-up card moves with everything stacked on it onto the same-suit card exactly one rank higher.
Only kings (with their stacks) may move to an empty column. Nothing builds on an ace.
A single face-up card on top of a tableau pile may move up to its foundation when it fits in suit and rank.
Uncovering a face-down card flips it.

Tips

Uncover face-down cards early: they are the hidden resource that unlocks the board.
Don't rush cards to the foundations if you may need them as tableau targets.
Empty columns are precious; earn one before you need it.

Russian solitaire is a member of the Yukon family, and it plays nothing like Klondike once you're a few moves in. There's no stock to draw from and no waste pile bailing you out with fresh cards. Every one of the 52 cards is dealt onto the seven columns at the start, most of them face up, and what you see in that opening layout is everything you're ever going to get. There's no redeal, no reshuffle, nothing held in reserve.

The short rules above tell you what's legal. This is about what actually makes the game hard: why a board that looks wide open can still trap you, which moves are worth making and which just waste a turn, and how honest we can be about your odds of winning.

Everything is on the table

Because the whole deck is dealt up front, most of the tableau is visible from move one. You can pick up any face-up card and carry it, along with every card stacked on top of it, to a new home in one move, whether or not that stack is in any kind of order. In Klondike you can only move a properly ordered run; here you can grab a jumbled pile of eight cards and relocate the whole thing if the bottom card fits where you're sending it. That's a lot of freedom, and it's the first thing new players notice.

The catch is that freedom doesn't come with a safety net. In Klondike, if you get stuck, you draw from the stock and see something new. In Russian solitaire, there's nothing left to draw. The deal you got is the deal you're playing, face-down cards and all, and if the layout doesn't cooperate, no amount of clever tableau shuffling conjures up a card that isn't there.

Same suit is what makes it brutal

Here's the rule that changes everything: you build down in the same suit, not alternating colors. A seven of spades only accepts a six of spades. Not a six of clubs, not a six of anything else black, just the six of spades specifically. Klondike gives you two cards of the right rank to work with for any given spot, since either red suit will do. Russian solitaire gives you exactly one.

That's what turns all that early freedom into a trap. You can move huge piles around with ease, but most of those moves don't actually get you anywhere, because the card you're moving onto has to match suit exactly. You'll often find yourself staring at a board full of legal moves where none of them help: you can shift a pile, sure, but shifting it doesn't uncover the card you need or open a spot the game actually wants filled. Add in the fact that there's no stock to fall back on, and you can see why this deal has a reputation as one of the toughest on the site. Wide-open boards and a strict same-suit rule pull in opposite directions, and the strict rule usually wins.

How to give yourself a chance

The same early-game instinct from Klondike still applies: get face-down cards turned over before you worry about anything else. Every hidden card is a card you can't plan around, and the sooner it's flipped, the sooner you know whether it's useful.

Protect your same-suit sequences once you've built them. A run of five spades in order is hard to put together and easy to break apart, and breaking one to make a small short-term gain often costs you more than it earns. Before you split up an ordered run, ask what you're actually getting for it; if the answer is "a card that doesn't free anything up," leave the run alone.

Treat empty columns as the most valuable real estate on the board. Only a king, dragging whatever's stacked on it, can move into an empty column, which makes emptying one out a genuine event, not a throwaway move. It's frequently the only way to get a large buried pile somewhere useful, so don't clear a column casually, and don't leave one sitting empty if you've got a king ready to go into it. A wasted empty column is a wasted chance to reorganize the board.

How winnable is Russian solitaire, really

We don't have a figure for this one, and we're not going to make one up. Unlike Golf or Pyramid, Russian solitaire's stacks can be rearranged in enough different orders that we can't exhaustively prove winnability the way we do for those games, and unlike Klondike or FreeCell, we couldn't find a published, methodology-disclosed study covering this specific variant. What we can tell you honestly is that the combination of a strict same-suit build and no stock to fall back on makes this one of the harder deals here, and you should expect to lose more often than you win, even with careful play.

Deals are seeded and reproducible, the same way every game on this site works, but they are never filtered for winnability. Some layouts are simply lost from the moment they're dealt, and there's no way to spot that from the opening board alone. If a game feels stuck, undo a few moves and see whether an earlier choice, especially one that broke up a same-suit run, had a better option you passed over.