Klondike Solitaire Glossary: Terms and Definitions

The layout

Deal: One shuffled arrangement of the 52 cards at the start of a game. Everyone who plays Daily Deal on the same day gets the same deal.
Column: One of the seven piles of cards in the middle of the table, where you build down in alternating colors. At the start the first column has one card and the seventh has seven.
Tableau: The older name for the seven columns taken together. It is French for picture, and patience books use it for any layout of cards on the table.
Foundation: One of the four piles you are trying to fill, one for each suit, built up from Ace to King. The game is won when all 52 cards are on the foundations.
Stock: The face-down pile of cards left over after the columns are dealt, 24 cards at the start. You turn cards from it when the columns offer nothing useful.
Waste: The face-up pile where cards turned from the stock land. Only its top card can be played.
Talon: An older word that books use for the waste pile, for the stock, or for both. If a rule book says talon, check which pile it means.
Face-down card: A card in a column that hasn’t been turned over yet. The deal starts with 21 of them, and uncovering them is most of the work of winning.

Build: To place a card on another according to the rules of the pile. Columns build down in alternating colors, and foundations build up in one suit.
Alternating colors: The column rule that a card goes on a card one rank higher of the other color, such as a black 6 on a red 7.
Run: A string of face-up cards in a column in descending order and alternating colors. You can move a whole run, or the lower part of one, as a unit. Also called a sequence.
Turn over: What happens to a face-down card when the cards on top of it are moved away. It turns face up and comes into play.
Empty column: A column with no cards left in it. Only a King, or a run that starts with a King, can go there. Older books call it a space or a lane.
Home: A card is sent home when it is played to its foundation. A card on a foundation can come back down to a column if you need it.
Undo: Takes back a move. In Daily Deal it is free, so you can step back to a choice you weren’t sure about and try the other way.
Hint: Shows you a move you could make. Hints count in your result for the day.

Draw one: The rule that you turn one card at a time from the stock to the waste, so every stock card gets its turn on top. Daily Deal is draw one.
Draw three: The rule that you turn three cards at a time and can play only the top one. It is the harder way to play, and the one most studies of Klondike use.
Pass: One trip through the stock from the first card to the last. Daily Deal lets you make as many passes as you like.
Redeal: Turning the waste pile back over to make a new stock when the stock runs out. Some rule sets limit the number of redeals, and some old ones allow none.

Winnable deal: A deal for which at least one sequence of legal moves puts all 52 cards on the foundations. Every Daily Deal is one.
Solver: A computer program that searches a deal for a winning line of play, or shows that there isn’t one. LarkSpark runs one on every Daily Deal before it is published.
Thoughtful solitaire: Klondike played with the position of every card known from the start, including the face-down ones. Researchers use it to measure how many deals can be won at all.
Unwinnable deal: A deal that can’t be won whatever you do. About one random draw-one deal in ten is unwinnable, which is why Daily Deal checks each one.

Patience: The older name, still common in Britain, for any card game played by one person. It came into English from French.
Solitaire: The North American name for card games for one. Used alone it usually means Klondike.
Klondike: The game Daily Deal plays: seven columns, four foundations, and a stock. The name dates from the years after the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s.
Seven-Card Klondike: The name the 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games gives to today’s Klondike, to tell it apart from a gambling game the same book calls Klondike.
Canfield: A name that has meant two games. Early American books used it for Klondike, and it is now the usual American name for a different game with a thirteen-card reserve.
Demon: The British name for the reserve game that Americans call Canfield. It is not Klondike, although old books sometimes mix the three names up.