Solitaire games — play free online

A solitaire is one player and one deck: there is no opponent, nobody rushes you, and the outcome depends only on how you lay the cards out by suit and rank. The deck is shuffled on every deal, so the same layout never comes back twice.

Most start with Klondike: seven fanned piles with the top card face up, build down in alternating colors, and only an ace may fill an empty column. FreeCell deals every card face up with four spare cells in plain sight, so a lost game is your own move rather than the deal. Spider runs on two decks and takes the longest, Pyramid lives on pairs that add up to thirteen, and Shuffle Islands is golf solitaire, where cards cover islands numbered 1 to 8.

Against card games with an opponent, durak or spades, a solitaire differs in that nobody sits across the table: you read no hand and stake nothing on a trick. Against a table game, nothing has to be shuffled or dealt by hand. A round takes two to ten minutes, which is why people open it in a queue, on a break, or before sleep.