Solitaire Glossary

The 47 terms that come up in our rules pages and articles, in one place. The same word often means slightly different things in different games and different books, so each entry also says how it works under this site's rules.

September 23, 2026 · 15-minute read

The small print under each entry lists the games that use the term and the page that covers it in more depth. Numbers and dates are taken only from sources checked for our articles.

The layout

Foundation

Where cards are collected. There are four, and each is built up in one suit from Ace to King; get all 52 cards home and you win. In Golf and TriPeaks a single waste pile that ignores suits plays this role instead.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · More: How to Play FreeCell

Tableau (columns)

The columns of cards laid out on the table, where you move and sort cards. FreeCell and Baker's Game deal eight columns (four of 7 cards, four of 6), Klondike seven columns of 1 to 7 cards, and Golf seven columns of 5. TriPeaks deals three peaks instead of columns.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · Golf · More: How to Play Klondike Solitaire

Free cell

A space that holds any single card for a while. The number of cells makes a huge difference: Charlie Blake and Ian P. Gent estimate that FreeCell is over 99.998% winnable with four cells but only about 79.54% with two. Older books called the cells in Eight Off "depots".
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · More: FreeCell Strategy — what one empty space is worth

Empty column

A column with no cards left. In FreeCell and Baker's Game it accepts any card or sequence and doubles how many cards you can move at once, so it is worth more than a free cell. In Klondike an empty column takes only a King or a sequence headed by a King, and in Golf an emptied column never refills.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · Golf · More: Klondike Strategy — Kings and empty columns

Stock

The rest of the pack, kept face down rather than dealt out. Klondike has 24 cards in the stock, TriPeaks 23 and Golf 16 (both counted after one card is turned up to start the waste pile). Our Klondike lets you go through the stock one card at a time as often as you like; in Golf and TriPeaks you get one pass only.
Used in: Klondike · Golf · TriPeaks · More: Klondike Strategy — the stock

Waste pile

Where cards turned from the stock land. In Klondike you play its top card to a column or a foundation. In Golf and TriPeaks the cards you clear from the layout go here too, so this one pile is the only foundation.
Used in: Klondike · Golf · TriPeaks · More: How to Play Golf Solitaire

Peaks

The TriPeaks layout: 28 cards overlapped in four rows of 3, 6, 9 and 10, forming three peaks. A card is free only when both cards directly below it are gone. Standard rules deal the upper 18 cards face down; this site deals all 28 face up.
Used in: TriPeaks · More: TriPeaks Strategy — the skeleton of a deal

Face-down card

A card lying face down so you can't see what it is. Klondike starts with 21 of them, and one turns over by itself once every face-up card above it has moved away. FreeCell, Baker's Game, Golf and our TriPeaks lay every layout card face up, so the only unknown is the order of the stock in Golf and TriPeaks.
Used in: Klondike · More: Klondike Strategy — freeing the 21 face-down cards

Building and moving

Building and packing

Foundations are built up by suit from the Ace; tableau columns are built down, one rank at a time. Card-game historian David Parlett calls games that first pack descending sequences on the layout "packers", and games that build straight onto the foundations "builders". FreeCell, Baker's Game and Klondike are packers.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · More: A History of Solitaire — where our five games fit

Alternating colours

The rule that red and black cards must alternate as you build down a column. A red 8 (♥8 or ♦8) goes on ♠9, so every card has two possible homes. Paul Alfille made FreeCell by swapping Baker's Game's in-suit rule for this one.
Used in: FreeCell · Klondike · More: FreeCell: History — origins and name

In suit

The rule that a column may only be built down in the same suit: only ♠8 goes on ♠9, so each card has a single home. That one change drops the share of winnable random deals from over 99.998% in FreeCell to about 75% in Baker's Game. Eight Off and Seahaven Towers also build in suit.
Used in: Baker's Game · More: How to Play Baker's Game

Sequence (run)

A line of cards in a column that follows the building rule, such as ♠9-♥8-♣7. Klondike lets you move any face-up sequence whole; FreeCell and Baker's Game only let you move as many cards as your empty spaces allow. In Baker's Game an in-suit sequence is already stacked in the order it will go home, which makes it especially valuable.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · More: Baker's Game Strategy — planning back from the foundations

Supermove

Moving several cards at once, which is really a shortcut for legal one-card moves through empty free cells and columns. The most you can move is (empty free cells + 1) × 2^{empty columns}, and an empty column you are moving into doesn't count. With four empty cells and no empty column that's 5 cards; with one empty column, 10.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · More: FreeCell Strategy — supermoves in numbers

Clearing a card

Moving a layout card onto the waste pile. Any card one rank above or below the top waste card can be cleared, whatever its suit, and you may switch between going up and going down on any play (6-7-6-5-4). Every win clears the same number of cards: 28 in TriPeaks, 35 in Golf.
Used in: Golf · TriPeaks · More: Golf Strategy — read the whole run before you move

Run

The number of cards cleared in a row without turning the stock, shown on screen as "n in a row". The 1991 Microsoft TriPeaks paid $1, $2, $3 and so on for each card in a run. This site keeps no score, but longer runs mean fewer draws, and fewer draws mean a better fewest-moves record.
Used in: TriPeaks · Golf · More: How to Play TriPeaks

Wrap-around (turning the corner)

Treating the ranks as a ring, so an Ace can follow a King and a 2 can follow an Ace. Our TriPeaks wraps, like the 1991 original; our Golf does not (though a Queen may go on a King). The Golf variant that joins Ace and King is known as Putt Putt or Relaxed Golf.
Used in: TriPeaks · Golf · More: Golf Solitaire: History — Aces and Kings

Draw

Turning one card from the stock. This site counts every draw as a move, so a winning Golf or TriPeaks move count is cards cleared plus draws. In Klondike, recycling the used-up stock is a move too. On a keyboard, the space bar draws.
Used in: Klondike · Golf · TriPeaks · More: Golf Strategy — the rankings

Foundation take-back

Moving the top card of a foundation back down to a column. On this site only Klondike allows it, and it is useful when you need a landing spot for an opposite-colour card. In FreeCell and Baker's Game a card that goes home stays there unless you undo. In a game that builds in suit there would be no reason to take a card back even if the rules allowed it: the only card that could go on it, the next lower card of its suit, is already home.
Used in: Klondike · More: Klondike Strategy — foundations, up and back down

Autoplay and controls

Autoplay

The game sending cards to the foundations by itself when doing so can't hurt. This site uses one rule in all three games: Aces and 2s always go up; any higher card goes up only once both opposite-colour suits have reached one rank below it (for ♥7, that means ♣6 and ♠6). In Klondike the waste card never autoplays, and an autoplayed card still counts as a move.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · More: FreeCell Strategy — when to send cards home

Safe move

Sending a card home when it can never again be needed as a landing spot. By Michael Keller's rule, ♦7 is safe once both black 5s and ♥4 are home. Our autoplay uses a different test: it waits for both black 6s before sending ♦7 up. So a card can be safe by Keller's rule and still not move by itself, and you can send it up by hand. In Baker's Game, which builds in suit, a move to the foundation is always safe.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · More: Baker's Game Strategy — send cards up when you can

Tap to move

Tapping a card once to send it somewhere sensible. The game tries a foundation, then a column with cards (from the left), then an empty column, and in FreeCell and Baker's Game a free cell last. Tapping the same card again tries the next option, but that counts as another move, so drag the card if the spot you want isn't the first choice. In Golf and TriPeaks a tap clears the card.
Used in: all five games · More: FreeCell Strategy — chasing the rankings

Undo

Taking back a move. Here it exists in FreeCell, Baker's Game and Klondike; undone moves drop out of your move count, but the clock keeps running. TriPeaks and Golf have no undo, because taking back a stock card would let you peek at the next one.
Used in: FreeCell · Baker's Game · Klondike · More: How to Play TriPeaks — why there is no undo

Stock rules and scoring

Draw one, draw three

Whether Klondike's stock is turned one card or three cards at a time. "Seven-Card Klondike" in the 1907 Hoyle's Games turned three, the 1913 rules turned one, and this site turns one. With every card known, 90.480% of deals are winnable drawing one and 81.945% drawing three (Blake and Gent).
Used in: Klondike · More: Klondike Solitaire: History — name and origins

Redeal (pass)

Turning the waste pile over to use it as the stock again. Our Klondike allows unlimited redeals, and the order never changes, so what you saw on one pass is useful on the next. Golf and TriPeaks never redeal. Windows Solitaire's Vegas scoring allowed only one pass when drawing one.
Used in: Klondike · More: Klondike Strategy — the stock

Vegas scoring

A money-style score offered in Solitaire since Windows 3.0. According to Microsoft's help text you ante $52 a game and win $5 for each card on the foundations, so 11 cards ($55) puts you ahead and all 52 nets $208. This site keeps no score; you compete on time and moves only.
Used in: Klondike (Windows) · More: Klondike Solitaire: History — on the computer

Hole and par

The scoring that gave Golf its name. Each deal is a hole, the cards left in the layout are your strokes, and the lowest total over nine holes wins; clear a deal and the cards left in the stock count as minus strokes. Sources disagree on par: Morehead and Mott-Smith and Keller use 4 a hole (36 for nine), Wikipedia 5 (45).
Used in: Golf · More: Golf Strategy — practising with deal numbers

Deals and solving

Deal

Shuffling and laying out the cards, or the layout that results. When several people play the same deal, the luck of the deal is the same for everyone, which makes it a fair test of skill.
Used in: all five games · More: Solitaire Competitions — how do you compete at solitaire?

Deal number

The number attached to each deal. The number fixes the shuffle, so the same number gives the same layout anywhere, any time, down to the face-down cards and the order of the stock. The best-known example is the 32,000 numbered deals Jim Horne gave Windows FreeCell. Our numbers use a different shuffle, so they don't match Microsoft's deals, and the same number gives a different layout in each game.
Used in: all five games · More: FreeCell: History — competing on this site

Solver

A program that searches a deal to find out whether it can be won. Solvers usually know every card and the order of the stock, so their win rates are a ceiling that a player who can't see the stock order can't exceed. This site has a solver actually solve each deal before it gets a number.
Used in: all five games · More: How to Play FreeCell — we never deal an unsolvable game

Winnable deal

A deal that perfect play can win. When we ran our solver over randomly shuffled deals, none of 20,000 FreeCell deals turned out unwinnable. Of 5,000 deals checked in each of the other games, 25.0% were unwinnable in Baker's Game, 3.1% in TriPeaks, 55.6% in Golf and 2.1% in Klondike. A few deals could not be decided in time; in Klondike that was 15.9%. All of those numbers were given different layouts, so every deal you get here can be won.
Used in: all five games · More: Game Guides — the five games at a glance

Deal #11982

The only deal among Windows FreeCell's original 32,000 that cannot be won with four free cells (five cells will do it). In the 1994–95 Internet FreeCell Project, more than 100 volunteers solved all the others by hand. Our #11982 is a different layout, and it can be won.
Used in: FreeCell · More: FreeCell: History — solved by people, solved by computers

Thoughtful solitaire

Klondike played as if you knew where every card is. The often-quoted "80 to 90% of games can be won" refers to this version. In the 2004 paper by Yan, Diaconis and colleagues, a human expert won 36.6% and a computer strategy 70.20% (drawing three). For ordinary games with unknown face-down cards, the reported computer win rate is a little over 35% drawing three.
Used in: Klondike · More: Klondike Solitaire: History — how often can you win?

Open and closed games

Parlett's classification. In an open game every card is visible from the start, so it is a problem to be solved by analysis; in a closed game face-down cards or a stock call for judgement; a half-open game starts closed and opens up as you play. By that test FreeCell and Baker's Game are open, while Klondike, Golf and TriPeaks, which all have a face-down stock, are closed. Our TriPeaks shows every peak card, but the stock order is still hidden.
Used in: all five games · More: A History of Solitaire — where our five games fit

NP-complete

The hardest problems in NP: an answer is easy to check, but no efficient way of finding one is known. Malte Helmert proved in 2003 that FreeCell generalised to more cards per suit is NP-complete, and Chuzo Iwamoto proved the same for generalised Golf in 2015. A single 52-card deal is another matter: in our checks, half of all FreeCell deals were settled in under 4 milliseconds.
Used in: FreeCell · Golf · More: Golf Solitaire: History — computers and the internet

Records and competition

Leaderboard

This site keeps two leaderboards for every deal number: fastest time and fewest moves. "By deal" shows one number's rankings, "All deals" the best records across every number, and "Try it" opens that deal. The server replays your moves and only posts records that really end in a win; you need a name to post one.
Used in: all five games · More: Solitaire Competitions — rankings on this site

Fewest moves

The record for winning in the fewest moves. A supermove counts as one move however many cards it carries, autoplayed cards and stock draws count one each, and undone moves drop out. So there is a floor: no deal can be won in fewer than 52 moves in FreeCell and Baker's Game, 76 in Klondike, 28 in TriPeaks or 35 in Golf. "Cards moved" on the result screen counts every card of a supermove and is for reference only.
Used in: all five games · More: FreeCell Strategy — chasing the rankings

Fastest time

The record for the shortest time from opening a deal to winning it. Time spent reading the deal counts, and undo doesn't turn back the clock. The clock stops only while you are in another window or have the in-game rules open. On equal times, fewer moves ranks higher. Setting Card speed to "Fast" or "Instant" cuts the time spent waiting for cards to fly.
Used in: all five games · More: TriPeaks Strategy — chasing the rankings

Winning streak

Consecutive games won without a loss. On PLATO, Paul Alfille recorded streaks rather than win percentages because they were easier to store, and his PLATO FreeCell kept a ranked list of the longest streaks. The online FreeCell server freecell.net deals harder games as a streak grows, and Keller's FAQ gives its all-time record as 20,994 in a row, by "Ki".
Used in: FreeCell · More: FreeCell: History — competitions, records and community

Elo rating

A skill rating that rises and falls with results, best known from chess. freecell.net rates its players with an Elo system alongside their streaks. This site has no Elo rating; you compete on the leaderboard for each deal number.
Used in: FreeCell · More: Solitaire Competitions — online

Duplicate play

Giving the same deals to different competitors and ranking them by relative performance. The idea began in whist and passed to bridge, and it reduces the part luck plays and increases the part skill plays. Same-deal solitaire contests use the principle; according to the organiser, every player at the 2026 Miami championship got the same deck setup. Our per-deal leaderboards work the same way.
Used in: all five games · More: Solitaire Competitions — how do you compete at solitaire?

Speedrun

A race to finish as fast as possible under fixed conditions. speedrun.com has leaderboards for Windows Solitaire (draw one and draw three, split by Windows version), FreeCell and TriPeaks; Golf is run on the SNES game Super Solitaire. Records of a few seconds depend heavily on the luck of the deal, which makes them a different contest from one where everyone gets the same deal.
Used in: Klondike · FreeCell · TriPeaks · Golf · More: Solitaire Competitions — Guinness and speedrun records

Duel

Our head-to-head FreeCell mode: two players get the same deal number and the first to finish wins. There is a 15-minute limit; if time runs out, whoever has more cards on the foundations wins. No entry fee, no prizes.
Used in: FreeCell · More: Solitaire Competitions — rankings on this site

Names and families

Solitaire

Any card game for one player, and in North America usually the one game called Klondike. It became the usual North American name in the 20th century and went global after Windows shipped "Solitaire" (really Klondike) in 1990. The pegboard game peg solitaire shares the name.
More: A History of Solitaire — patience or solitaire?

Patience

The earlier name in both British and American sources, and still common in Britain. Parlett puts the earliest safe date for patience at about 1758, and the earliest known printed description, in a German book of 1788, is of a betting game for two. The French mostly say réussite; Danes and Norwegians say Kabale.
More: A History of Solitaire — it began as a bet

Klondike

The game most people simply call Solitaire: seven columns of 1 to 7 cards and a stock to turn. Keller found it in a 1905 book under another name; the earliest rules Wikipedia cites are in the 1907 Hoyle's Games. The popular story that the name comes from the Yukon gold rush has no documentary support. Americans once also called it Canfield, a name that today belongs to a different game.
Used in: Klondike · More: Klondike Solitaire: History — name and origins

Eight Off

An in-suit game with eight free cells (four filled at the start) and eight columns of six cards; only Kings go in empty columns. Keller counts it among the oldest games of this type and describes Baker's Game as its variant, though when Eight Off first appeared in print hasn't been established. About 99.88% of deals are winnable.
Related: Baker's Game · More: Baker's Game: History — name and origin

Golf family

Games where cards one rank up or down, of any suit, are played onto a single pile. Golf has also been called One Foundation; TriPeaks puts Golf's play on a layout reminiscent of Pyramid; and Parlett's Black Hole is derived from Golf too.
Used in: Golf · TriPeaks · More: Golf Solitaire: History — the Golf family

Sources

1. FreeCell FAQ — Michael Keller, Solitaire Laboratory
2. History of Patience/Solitaire — David Parlett
3. Solitaire — Wikipedia (summary of Parlett's classification)
4. The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire and Many Other Patience Games — Charlie Blake, Ian P. Gent, arXiv 2019 / JAIR 2026
5. Solitaire: Man Versus Machine — Yan, Diaconis, Rusmevichientong, Van Roy, 2004
6. Lower Bounding Klondike Solitaire with Monte-Carlo Planning — Bjarnason et al., 2009
7. Klondike (solitaire) — Wikipedia
8. Solitaire Help — copy of Microsoft's help text
9. Golf (patience) — Wikipedia
10. Experimental Analysis of Golf Solitaire — Jan Wolter, 2013
11. TRIPEAKS.HLP (help file of the 1991 original) — rhogue.com, archived 2009
12. Eight Off — Wikipedia
13. Complexity results for standard benchmark domains in planning — Malte Helmert, Artificial Intelligence, 2003
14. Computational Complexity of Generalized Golf Solitaire — Chuzo Iwamoto, 2015
15. Interview with Paul Alfille — freecell.net, 2000
16. Freecell.net — Dennis Cronin
17. Duplicate bridge — Wikipedia
18. Solitaire leaderboards — speedrun.com

Keep reading — All reading · A History of Solitaire (Patience) · Solitaire Competitions and Communities · Game Guides