Dragon Solitaire is the timeless Klondike card game with a bit of fire. Draw from the stock, build the tableau down in alternating colours, and send each suit up to the four foundations from Ace to King. Slay the deck — clear all four foundations — to win. It is the same single-deck game that has shipped with computers for decades, only warmer: free in your browser, with unlimited undo, hints and full-screen, and nothing to install.
How to play Dragon Solitaire
A game of Dragon Solitaire opens with 28 cards dealt into a seven-column tableau — one card in the first column, two in the second, and so on up to seven — with only the last card of each column turned face-up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock in the corner. Your job is to unearth the buried cards and ferry all 52 up to four foundation piles.
Build the tableau downward in alternating colours: a red six settles onto a black seven, a black five onto a red six, and so on. Turn cards from the stock to the waste pile to bring fresh options into play. When a face-down card is exposed, flip it. Whenever an Ace surfaces, send it straight to a foundation, then stack that suit upward — two, three, four — as the cards appear. Empty a whole column and only a King (or a King-led run) may claim the vacant space. Undo is unlimited and Hint points to a legal move when the board looks cold. Craving a bigger beast? Take on Spider or the all-face-up Yukon.
Dragon Solitaire strategy & tips
The fastest way to smother a Dragon game is to rush Aces and twos to the foundations. Once a low card leaves the tableau you can no longer park an opposite-colour card on it, so keep some mid-rank cards in play as landing spots before you commit. Prioritise turning face-down cards: the column with the most hidden cards holds the most trapped points, so dig there first.
Always deal from the stock before you assume you are stuck — a single new card can reopen the board. When you can expose a face-down card by moving a run, do it, even if a foundation play is available; buried cards are the real enemy. Try to keep at least one column workable as a King landing zone rather than emptying and immediately refilling it. And do not over-feed the foundations near the endgame — you may need a card back in the tableau to free a colour you are missing. Undo generously; the strongest players treat each game as a puzzle to solve, not a gamble.
Why Klondike earned its crown
Dragon Solitaire runs on Klondike, the patience game that became the world's most-played card game almost by accident. Klondike likely takes its name from the 1890s Yukon gold rush, where prospectors supposedly dealt it by lamplight — a fitting origin for a game about slow, patient digging. It went global in 1990 when it was bundled with a certain desktop operating system, partly to teach nervous users the drag-and-drop mouse gesture. Billions of games later, the habit stuck.
Not every deal is winnable — estimates put solvable single-draw Klondike games around 80 percent — which is exactly why skill matters. Two players handed the same shuffle can reach very different endings. That blend of luck and decision-making is what keeps Dragon Solitaire endlessly replayable. When you want a different rhythm, the same tableau instincts carry over to Yukon.