MOVE THE MESS. FREE THE CARDS.
Yukon Solitaire
Play Yukon solitaire free online — no download, no sign-up, works on any device. Yukon deals the entire deck to seven columns: there is no stock and no waste, so every card in the game is on the table from the first move. The twist that defines the family: any face-up card can move, carrying everything stacked on top of it — in order or not. Undo and hints are built in.
only 7♦ must fit 8♣ Learn Yukon Solitaire in 90 seconds: rules and 5 habits
The deal, building in alternating colors, how scrambled cards ride along with group moves, and five habits that win more games. Full written rules follow below.
In this video
01 · THE WHOLE DECK IS ON THE TABLE
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.
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7 02 · ONLY THE BOTTOM CARD MUST FIT
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.
03 · NO DRAW. NO WAITING.
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.
04 · DIG BEFORE YOU TIDY
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.
WAIT The lower bound says many deals contain a line. Finding it still depends on excavation.
05 · TWO FIXED LESSONS
Learn the freedom. Then use it to reveal.
Both lessons restart to a fixed deal, so every attempt teaches the same position. First expose a hidden card. Then make the move that exists only in Yukon.
01 Expose one hidden card The whole game in one exercise: find the move that turns a face-down card face-up. This deal has one available immediately. +
02 Move a loose group of four Now the family signature: pick up a messy group of four or more cards in a single move. Order doesn’t matter — only the bottom card has to fit. +
06 · FIVE WINNING HABITS
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.
- 01 Count the buried cards
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.
- 02 Flip before sorting
Rate every candidate move by flips first: a move that exposes a face-down card beats a prettier one that doesn’t.
- 03 Prepare the King
Hold empty columns for Kings that unlock something — parking a random King wastes the rarest resource on the board.
- 04 Bank foundations late
Bank foundations late. Cards can’t come back down here, and mid-ranks sent up early strand the cards that needed them.
- 05 Move the mess with purpose
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.
07 · QUICK ANSWERS
Yukon solitaire FAQ
01 What’s the difference between Yukon and Klondike? +
Two things: Yukon deals the whole deck face-up-heavy with no stock or waste, and it lets you move any face-up card together with everything above it, ordered or not. Klondike’s draw pile and tidy-run rule are gone; in exchange, every game is an open puzzle solved by moves alone.
02 Can I really move cards that aren’t in sequence? +
Yes — that is the defining Yukon rule. Any face-up card can be picked up with the entire (possibly scrambled) stack on top of it. Only the bottom card of the group must fit its destination: one rank down from the target card, opposite color. The cards riding along can be anything.
03 Is every Yukon deal winnable? +
No. Deals on this page are honestly random — no pre-filtered pool. Our search solver finds a complete winning line on about three of four random deals within its budget (the true winnable share is a little higher — some searches run out of budget before a verdict), and a small number of deals are provably lost from the start. We log real games here and publish the measured human win rate on our win-rates page once there is enough data.
04 How do the hints work? +
Hint runs a search solver on the actual deal — the same standard as our Golf and FreeCell hints. When a winning line exists within its search budget, every hint is a move along that line; when it can’t find one, it suggests the strongest continuation it reached (most cards freed, most banked). It works from the real deal the way the Golf solver reads the real stock order, so following hints is watching a solution unfold, not a guess.
05 What can I put on an empty column? +
Kings only — either a lone King or a King carrying its stack. The rule matches Klondike, and it is what makes empty columns so valuable: they are the only place a buried King group can ever move to.
06 What are Russian and Alaska solitaire? +
Rule-variants of the identical Yukon deal. Russian solitaire requires building down in the SAME suit — dramatically harder. Alaska solitaire keeps same-suit building but allows sequences to run up or down. All three share the group-move freedom.