Yukon Solitaire

How Yukon solitaire works

The deal puts one face-up card on the first column; each of the other six columns gets a growing pack of face-down cards (one through six) topped by five face-up cards — 52 cards in all, nothing held back. You build the tableau downward in alternating colors, exactly like Klondike, and win by moving all four suits to the foundations, Ace to King. Only a pile’s top card may leave for a foundation, and foundations take one card at a time. When a move exposes a face-down card, it flips — and flipping all 21 of them is the real work of the game.

The group move: order doesn’t matter

In Klondike you may only move a tidy, sequenced run. In Yukon any face-up card is a handle: pick it up and every card above it comes along, however scrambled the stack. The only legality check is at the bottom of the group — the card you grab must land on a card one rank higher in the opposite color (or a King group onto an empty column). This one change turns the game inside out: burying a card is rarely fatal, because you can haul the whole mess somewhere else later. Plans in Yukon are about which mess to move, and when.

Yukon vs Klondike

Same placement rule, same foundations, completely different game. Klondike rations information through the stock, one draw at a time; Yukon shows you everything except the 21 face-down cards immediately. There is no draw to wait for and no recycling — every position is fully your problem to solve with moves alone. Games run longer, decisions run deeper, and skill counts for more: with the whole deck in view, a lost Yukon game usually traces back to a specific choice, not the luck of the draw. If Yukon clicks and you want it stricter, Russian solitaire plays the identical deal with same-suit building, and Alaska solitaire lets suit sequences run both directions.

Strategy: dig, don’t tidy

Every face-down card is a hostage, and moves that free one outrank moves that merely look neat. Prefer plays that flip a face-down card; between two of those, dig at the columns hiding more cards — the sixth and seventh columns start six and five deep. Empty columns are precious and only Kings may claim them, so clear a column when a useful King group is ready to take it, not before. And go slow with the foundations: on this page a banked card stays banked, and a Three sent up too early can strand the black Twos it was supposed to catch. The Hint button is backed by a real search solver working from the actual deal (the same standard as our Golf and FreeCell hints): when it finds a winning line within its search budget, hints follow that line; otherwise they play the strongest continuation it found. In our benchmark it finds full winning lines on roughly three of four random deals — deals here stay honestly random, with no cherry-picking.

Five habits that win more Yukon games

Yukon rewards excavation over housekeeping. These habits separate players who flip twenty-one cards from players who flip nine.

1. Count the face-down cards per column before your first move — the columns hiding the most are where your game will be won or lost.
2. Rate every candidate move by flips first: a move that exposes a face-down card beats a prettier one that doesn’t.
3. Hold empty columns for Kings that unlock something — parking a random King wastes the rarest resource on the board.
4. Bank foundations late. Cards can’t come back down here, and mid-ranks sent up early strand the cards that needed them.
5. Use the group move to un-bury, not to sort: hauling a scrambled pile off a face-down card is exactly what the rule is for.

Yukon solitaire FAQ