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How to Set Up Solitaire With a Real Deck of Cards

One standard deck and a bit of table space is all you need. Here is the deal, one step at a time.

Setting up solitaire takes about a minute. These steps are for Klondike, the classic version most people know as just “solitaire”. The setup for Spider, FreeCell and Yukon is at the end.

What you need

• One standard deck of 52 cards, with the jokers taken out.
• A flat surface about seven cards wide. A table is ideal.
• Five minutes. A game usually takes less.

Setting up Klondike

1. Shuffle well. Riffle the deck a few times. A lazy shuffle leaves runs of cards in their original order, which makes the game too easy or oddly stuck.
2. Deal the first row. Put one card face up on the left. Then put one card face down to its right, and keep going until you have seven cards across: one up, six down.
3. Deal the second row. Skip the first column. Put one card face up on the second column, then one card face down on each of the columns three to seven.
4. Keep going. Each row starts one column further right. The third row starts with a face-up card on column three, and so on, until column seven gets its one face-up card on top.
5. Make the stock. The 24 cards that are left stay in your hand. Put them face down in the top-left corner.
6. Leave the other spaces empty. Next to the stock, keep room for the waste pile. In the top right, leave four spaces for the foundations.

Check that you got it right

A correct deal always passes these checks:

• The columns hold 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 cards from left to right.
• Exactly one card in each column is face up, and it is the last one.
• The stock has 24 cards. Together with the 28 in the columns that is the full 52.

If a column is short or a pile has the wrong number, gather the cards and deal again. A deal that looks nearly right is the most common reason a game never seems to work out.

Where to start

Look at the seven face-up cards. Play any Ace to the foundations. Then look for a card that fits on another column (a red 6 on a black 7, for example), and prefer the move that turns over a hidden card. When nothing is left, turn cards from the stock. The full rules are on how to play solitaire, and a few habits that win more games are in the strategy tips.

Setting up the other popular games

• Spider: shuffle two decks together (104 cards). Deal 54 cards to ten columns: the first four columns get 6 cards each, the other six get 5 each, and only the last card of each column is face up. The other 50 cards are the stock.
• FreeCell: deal all 52 cards face up into eight columns, one card at a time from left to right. The first four columns end up with 7 cards and the last four with 6. Keep four empty spaces at the top for the free cells and four for the foundations.
• Yukon: seven columns like Klondike, but all 52 cards are used and there is no stock. The first column has one face-up card; each other column gets one more face-down card than the one before it (1 to 6), then five face-up cards on top.

Prefer not to deal by hand?

You can play Klondike online and the game deals itself, with undo and hints. If you want to see how the layout counts up, how many rows are in solitaire lays it all out in one table.