How to play Klondike Solitaire Turn 1
Move all 52 cards onto the four foundations, building each suit up in order from ace to king. Clear every card and you win.
The deal lays out seven tableau columns of one to seven cards, with only the top card of each face up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock in the corner.
- On the tableau, build downward in alternating colors: a red six goes on a black seven.
- Tap or drag a card to move it; face-up runs move together. Turning over every face-down card is the real puzzle.
- Tap the stock to deal one card at a time to the waste. When the stock runs out, tap again to recycle the waste, as often as you like.
- Only a king can fill an empty column, and aces start the foundations.
Klondike solitaire turn 1 tips
- This draw is fixed to one card - every card in the stock will surface eventually, so patience is rewarded more than in draw-3.
- Flip face-down cards before anything else: a hidden card is worth more than a tidy foundation.
- Empty a column only when you have a king ready for it, ideally one with a useful run behind it.
Turn 1 is Klondike with the stock turned over one card at a time. This page is fixed to that rule, so you never have to go looking for a setting: click the stock, one card comes up, and it is yours to play. If you want the traditional three-card rule instead, play turn 3 solitaire, and if you want the full strategy guide, history and scoring, that lives on the main Klondike solitaire page.
This is the forgiving version, and it is forgiving for one specific, measurable reason rather than a vague one. What follows is that reason, and how to take advantage of it.
Why turn 1 solitaire is the easier setting
In turn 3 the stock comes up in groups and only the front card of each group is live. The two behind it are visible but untouchable until the whole stock has been cycled again. Turn 1 deletes that problem. Every card in the stock arrives on its own, on top, playable the moment it appears.
That has a knock-on effect bigger than it sounds. In turn 3, which cards you can reach depends on where the group boundaries happen to fall, and those boundaries shift every time you play a card off the waste. Half of turn-3 play is managing that rhythm. In turn 1 there is no rhythm to manage. Cycle the stock once and you have had access to every card in it. Nothing is hiding behind anything.
So the question in turn 1 is never "can I get to that card?" It is only "is there still somewhere to put it?" That is a much simpler game to think about, which is why a beginner should start here.
Turn 1 Klondike strategy: the stock stops being your excuse
Because every stock card is reachable, a lost turn-1 game is nearly always a tableau problem. You ran out of places to put cards, not out of ways to reach them. That changes what you should be watching from the first move.
Flip face-down cards before anything else. In turn 1 another look at the stock is cheap, so spending moves to open a column costs you almost nothing, while a face-down card you never turn over is a card that can never help you. When a stock move and a flip move both look fine, take the flip.
Hold your low cards back. A two or a three sitting on the tableau is the only thing that can catch the opposite-colored card one rank above it. Sending it up the moment it is legal feels productive and quietly strands cards later. Turn 1 makes this mistake easier to commit, because cards keep flowing at you and it always feels like there is more where that came from.
Only empty a column when you have a king ready to move into it, ideally a king with a run already stacked on it. An empty column with nothing to fill it is not a resource, it is a hole in your board.
How winnable is turn 1 solitaire?
90.480% of draw-1 Klondike deals can be won, give or take 0.116%.
That comes from Charlie Blake and Ian P. Gent, in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, February 2026. Their solver worked through 1,000,000 draw-1 deals: 904,226 winnable, 94,629 unwinnable, and 1,145 it could not settle either way. The same solver put draw-3 at 81.945%, which makes the draw rule alone worth about 8.5 percentage points. Their full paper is published in JAIR. It assumes redeals without limit, which is what this page gives you, so the figure describes the rules you are actually playing under.
Read that number carefully, because it is not a prediction about you. The solver sees every face-down card before it makes a move, so it is answering whether a deal can be won by someone who already knows where everything is. You are playing blind. 90.480% is a ceiling, not a target.
How far below the ceiling? Nobody has measured real turn-1 play at that scale, but the turn-3 evidence is sobering: expert players who were shown every face-down card still won only 36.6% of 2,000 games in a 2004 study, and the strongest computer players under normal hidden-card conditions sit around 36% to 37%. Turn 1 will treat you better than that. It will not treat you 90% well. There is more on that gap in the main Klondike guide.
Deals here are seeded, so the same seed always deals the same game and you can replay one exactly. They are random by default: roughly one turn-1 deal in ten cannot be won by anybody, and we don't filter those out to make the win rate look healthier than it is. If you'd rather skip the lost causes, turn on "Winnable deals only" in the settings menu and we'll deal you a game the solver has proved can be won.
Turn 1 solitaire FAQ
Is turn 1 solitaire easier than turn 3?
Yes, and by a measured amount. With a solver that can see every face-down card, 90.480% of turn-1 deals are winnable against 81.945% of turn-3 deals: a gap of about 8.5 percentage points from the draw rule alone.
Is every turn 1 solitaire deal winnable?
No. Roughly one deal in ten cannot be won even by a player who can see every face-down card from the start, and nothing in the opening layout tells you which deals those are.
Does turn 1 mean unlimited passes through the stock?
On this page, yes: you can recycle the waste as many times as you want. Some versions elsewhere cap turn-1 play at a single pass, which is a much harder game, and the published winnability figures do not describe it.
Should a beginner play turn 1 or turn 3?
Turn 1. Every card in the stock becomes reachable on its own, so you can spend your attention on the tableau instead of on timing your passes. Move to turn 3 once planning the tableau feels comfortable.