Solitaire Games Ranked by Difficulty

Not all solitaire games are created equal. TriPeaks Solitaire has a casual win rate around 85%. Spider 4-Suit sits below 10%. Between those extremes lie nine other games, each with a distinct difficulty personality shaped by hidden information, move constraints, luck weighting, and strategic depth.

After building and playing all of these games for years, here’s how I’d rank them — and more importantly, why each one sits where it does.

This ranking covers every solitaire game available at Card & Puzzle, ordered from easiest to hardest. Win rates reflect casual play — an experienced player will beat these figures in the forgiving games and may struggle to reach them in the harder ones.

Difficulty Ranking Table

1. TriPeaks — Easiest (~85% win rate)

TriPeaks Solitaire sits at the top of the approachability chart for two reasons: the card accessibility rules are generous, and the chain mechanic rewards correct play with fast, satisfying cascades.

The board presents three overlapping pyramid peaks. You clear cards by playing them onto a waste pile when they are one rank higher or lower than the current waste card, regardless of suit. In this implementation, Kings and Aces wrap around — a King can play onto an Ace — so the sequence never truly dead-ends unless the waste card becomes isolated from everything available.

The skill ceiling in TriPeaks is not high, but it exists. The key decision is order of removal: when two exposed cards are both playable, choosing the one that uncovers a more useful card beneath it is what separates good players from lucky ones. Most losses come from running out of stock cards with a small cluster of isolated cards remaining — a situation that better sequencing could have avoided.

For new players and anyone who wants a quick, relaxing game that usually ends in a win, TriPeaks is the right starting point.

Play: TriPeaks Solitaire — Guide

2. Golf — Easy to Medium (~65–70% win rate)

Golf Solitaire is faster than most solitaire games and more strategic than its ease-of-learning suggests. Seven columns of five face-up cards sit in the tableau. You play the bottom card of any column onto the waste pile when it is one rank adjacent to the current waste card. Runs chain across columns with no suit restriction, so a 5 can chain to any 4 or 6 anywhere on the board. In our version, Aces are flexible — the sequence wraps, so a Two plays onto an Ace and a Queen plays onto a King.

The difficulty comes from two places. First, the stock is finite: 16 cards remain after the initial deal, and drawing a new card resets your chain. Draws waste precious stock and are often unavoidable. Second, columns with only one or two cards become “stubs” that can block access to nothing useful — a 5 and a 9 in the same column will never interact in a chain, and each draw from the stock is a gamble on whether the next card connects.

The skill in Golf is learning to read chains before committing to them. A sequence of moves that clears four cards but leaves an ugly stub is usually worse than a sequence that clears two cards and opens up a long chain elsewhere.

Play: Golf Solitaire — Guide

3. Spider 1-Suit — Easy to Medium (~60–80% win rate)

Spider 1-Suit is the gentlest entry point into the Spider family. Using a single suit across both decks means every descending sequence can be moved as a unit — there is no suit-matching constraint to fight against. The goal is to build eight complete King-to-Ace runs, which then auto-remove to the foundations.

The win rate range is wide (60–80%) because skill matters considerably. A player who understands how to create and protect empty columns will win far more often than one who deals from the stock prematurely or clutters the tableau with tangled sequences.

The primary difficulty is managing empty columns and avoiding over-dealing from the stock. Each stock deal drops one card onto each of the ten columns — even columns that are not ready for them. Dealing too early buries accessible cards and reduces maneuvering room. Experienced players sometimes complete 1-Suit without using the stock at all.

Play: Spider 1-Suit — Full Spider Guide

4. Klondike Turn 1 — Medium (~30–35% win rate)

Klondike Turn 1 is the iconic version of the most-played solitaire game in history. Despite its familiarity, it is a genuinely medium-difficulty game. The 30–35% casual win rate means you will lose roughly two out of every three games, and some of those losses are not your fault.

Why is Klondike harder than Golf or TriPeaks despite its gentler reputation? Two reasons. First, hidden cards in the tableau mean you regularly make decisions without knowing what a move will reveal. Second, a significant fraction of Klondike deals (roughly 20% of Turn 1 deals, by most analyses) are unwinnable from the start, regardless of how perfectly you play.

The skill in Klondike is minimizing waste: every card you move onto a foundation pile should be evaluated against whether that card might be needed in the tableau later. Turning a 5 up to the foundation sounds good until it blocks you from placing a 6, and suddenly a sequence you needed is stuck. The Klondike Guide covers this in depth.

Play: Klondike Solitaire — Turn 1 Classic

5. FreeCell — Medium (~30–35% casual win rate, nearly 100% with optimal play)

FreeCell Solitaire is unusual in that its casual win rate (~30–35%) dramatically undersells how winnable it actually is. Of the standard numbered FreeCell deals that have been exhaustively analyzed, only one (Deal #11982) is confirmed unsolvable. The rest can be won with correct play.

What makes FreeCell medium-difficulty for casual players is the planning depth required. All 52 cards are visible at the start, which eliminates luck — but it also means the solution is always there if you can see it. The four free cells act as a buffer for individual cards during complex reorganizations, and managing those cells efficiently is the core skill.

FreeCell’s difficulty is therefore cognitive rather than probabilistic. You are not fighting bad luck; you are fighting your own limited lookahead. Most FreeCell losses come from players who lock their free cells too early, run out of maneuvering room, and find the tableau frozen. Experienced players who plan 10–15 moves ahead will win the vast majority of games.

Play: FreeCell Solitaire — Guide

6. Yukon — Hard (~25–30% win rate)

Yukon Solitaire starts with the same setup as Klondike — seven columns, alternating-color descending build order, four foundation piles — but adds one rule that changes the game completely. In Yukon, you can pick up any face-up card and move it, along with every card sitting on top of it, regardless of whether those cards form a legal sequence.

This feels like freedom. In practice, it creates chaos. Without the discipline of Klondike’s strict sequence movement rules, players constantly move jumbled groups of cards that are difficult to unpack later. The tableau fills with disordered piles, each of which must be sorted before the cards beneath can be reached, and sorting a disordered pile in Yukon often requires cascading moves across multiple columns.

There is no stock pile in Yukon (all cards are dealt to the tableau at the start). There is no second chance to draw the card you need. Everything you will ever have to work with is on the board immediately, which raises the stakes for every decision.

Play: Yukon Solitaire — Guide

7. Pyramid — Hard (~15–20% win rate)

Pyramid Solitaire plays differently from every other game in this list. Instead of building sequences, you remove pairs of cards that sum to 13 — and a card is only removable when it is fully exposed (no cards from the row below are still covering it). Kings, which equal 13, remove alone.

The low win rate is driven by card order dependency. A card you need to complete a pair may be buried beneath three others that cannot be cleared until the card you need appears. This creates circular dependencies that are genuinely unresolvable in many deals. Unlike FreeCell, where the solution is almost always present if you can find it, Pyramid deals have a substantial fraction (~15–20%) that are provably unwinnable, and a further large chunk that are lost by most players despite being technically solvable.

The stock and waste pile give you three passes through the remaining cards, but the three-pass rule still does not help when the pyramid structure itself creates a blockage. Strategic play matters — choosing which pair to remove when multiple options exist can determine whether the pyramid unlocks or freezes — but luck plays a larger role in Pyramid than in most other solitaire types.

Play: Pyramid Solitaire — Guide

8. Spider 2-Suit — Hard (~15–20% win rate)

Spider 2-Suit introduces the suit-matching constraint that defines Spider’s identity at higher difficulty levels. Sequences can still be built with mixed suits, but only same-suit sequences move as a unit. Everything else must be moved card by card.

The implication is dramatic. Mixing suits to create a long descending sequence that looks organized is actually a trap: you cannot move that sequence as a block, and dismantling it requires card-by-card relocation that consumes the empty columns you need for other operations. Managing which sequences are suit-pure and which are mixed — and deciding when to invest in cleaning up a mixed sequence versus building elsewhere — is the central strategic question.

Two suits also means a higher ratio of “suit conflicts” in the tableau. Where 1-Suit lets you stack anything anywhere, 2-Suit forces you to think about suit identity for every card placement.

Play: Spider 2-Suit — Full Spider Guide

9. Klondike Turn 3 — Hard (~10–15% win rate)

Klondike Turn 3 is the same game as Turn 1 with one rule change: you draw three cards from the stock at a time, only accessing the top card of each group of three. This restriction dramatically reduces how often any given card in the stock is accessible, and it forces you to cycle through the waste pile multiple times to reach buried cards.

The lower win rate relative to Turn 1 is not merely because the stock is harder to use — it is because the reduced stock accessibility often means that even a winnable tableau cannot be completed before the stock cycles lock you out of a critical card. Planning the stock sequence becomes as important as managing the tableau, which adds a layer of strategic complexity that casual players often find frustrating.

Turn 3 is the traditional “casino” mode of Klondike — the format that made the game a genuine gambling vehicle before it became a computer game.

Play: Klondike Turn 3 — Full Klondike Guide

10. Addiction 7 — Very Hard (~10–15% win rate)

Addiction 7 Solitaire is a condensed version of the classic Addiction (Montana) format, using only the Ace through Seven of each suit across a 4×7 grid. Aces are removed at the start to create four gaps. You slide cards into gaps following a strict rule: the card must be the same suit as the card to its left and exactly one rank higher. Twos can go in any leftmost position.

What makes this so difficult is the frequency of locked states. A gap that appears to the right of a Seven — the highest card in the game — cannot be filled by anything. If multiple such gaps accumulate, rows stagnate. Two shuffles are available to reorganize unplaced cards, but shuffles reset progress in already-building rows and often create new problems while solving old ones.

Unlike most solitaire games where you are reacting to a sequence of reveals, Addiction 7 requires fully planning each placement in the context of the entire grid. Moving a card to fill one gap may block two others. The game is won or lost on the quality of planning four to six moves ahead.

Play: Addiction 7 Solitaire — Guide

11. Spider 4-Suit — Expert (~5–10% win rate)

Spider 4-Suit is the hardest game available at Card & Puzzle and one of the most demanding solitaire games in widespread play. Two decks, four suits, ten columns, and the requirement that only same-suit sequences move as a unit combine into a game where a single wrong move can cascade into an unsolvable board state many moves later.

The core challenge is suit fragmentation. With four suits across 104 cards in ten columns, the chance that any given column contains cleanly organized same-suit sequences is very low. Most columns are mixed from the start, and building a complete King-to-Ace run requires isolating a single suit across the entire tableau — rearranging dozens of other cards to clear a path, maintaining empty columns during that process, and avoiding locking any suit’s cards beneath un-movable sequences.

Expert Spider 4-Suit players do not just plan ahead — they hold a mental model of the entire tableau state while executing multi-step sequences across multiple columns. It is the closest thing to a puzzle game that solitaire gets.

Play: Spider 4-Suit — Full Spider Guide

What Makes a Solitaire Game Hard?

Difficulty in solitaire is not a single dimension. Several distinct factors contribute, and different games are hard in different ways.

Hidden information. Games like Klondike and Yukon hide a portion of the tableau under face-down cards. You cannot plan around what you cannot see. FreeCell and Addiction 7, by contrast, start with everything visible, which shifts difficulty entirely to cognitive planning.

Unwinnable deals. Some games have deals that are impossible regardless of how well you play. Pyramid and Klondike both have unwinnable configurations baked into a percentage of shuffles. FreeCell has almost none. Games with a high proportion of unwinnable deals impose a ceiling on how much skill can improve your win rate.

Move constraint tightness. FreeCell restricts how many cards you can move at once (based on free cell count). Addiction 7 allows only one specific card in each gap. Tighter constraints mean fewer options, which means errors compound faster.

Luck weighting. TriPeaks and Golf are heavily luck-influenced: the distribution of cards determines how often long chains appear. Klondike is moderately luck-weighted. FreeCell and Addiction 7 are almost entirely skill-based.

Sequence complexity. Spider 4-Suit requires building eight complete 13-card same-suit sequences across a 104-card tableau while maintaining maneuvering room. The combinatorial complexity of keeping that many simultaneous sequences in mind exceeds most other solitaire formats.

Difficulty vs Enjoyment

My personal favorite is FreeCell, which is not the easiest game on this list. But that is exactly the point — sometimes a harder game is more satisfying to win. FreeCell’s full-information setup means every loss is traceable, every win is earned, and there is no luck to blame or credit.

Harder games also tend to produce better stories. Clearing a Spider 4-Suit board after 30 minutes of careful work feels different from clearing a TriPeaks board in 90 seconds, even though both are wins. Use the difficulty ranking to understand what you are getting into, not to decide what you should enjoy.

Where to Start

If you are new to solitaire, this progression covers the major mechanical families without overwhelming you early. For a broader look at what makes each variant unique beyond just difficulty, see the guide to types of solitaire games.

1. TriPeaks Solitaire — Learn how sequential card play works. The high win rate means you will finish games and understand the satisfaction of clearing a board.

2. Golf Solitaire — Similar mechanic to TriPeaks but with more tactical decision-making around chain sequencing. Faster games.

3. Klondike Turn 1 — The classic. Learn tableau-building, alternating-color sequences, and foundation management. This is the foundation for most other tableau games.

4. FreeCell Solitaire — Once Klondike is comfortable, FreeCell teaches you to plan ahead without any luck involved. Every win is earned through clear thinking.

5. Spider 1-Suit — The Spider family’s entry point. Introduces the two-deck tableau format and empty-column strategy.

6. From there: Yukon if you want more Klondike-family depth, Pyramid if you want a break from tableau-building, Spider 2-Suit if you are ready for Spider’s full challenge, or Addiction 7 if you want something completely different.

All of these games are free to play at Card & Puzzle, with no downloads or registration required, on any device.