pips&pegs

Golf Solitaire

One pile. Up or down by one. Clear the course.

moves 0 time 0:00

Golf is the fastest solitaire there is. Thirty-five cards in seven columns, one card face up as your pile, and a simple rule: you may play any exposed card that is one rank above or one rank below the top of the pile. Six on a five. Six on a seven. Then keep going.

Chains are the point. A good run — seven, eight, nine, eight, seven, six — clears half a column in a breath, and finding those chains is the whole pleasure. Stuck? Turn a card from the stock and start again. Clear all seven columns and you've made par.

How Golf Solitaire works

  1. Play an exposed tableau card onto the pile if it's one higher or one lower, regardless of suit.
  2. There is no wrapping: an ace does not follow a king, and a king does not follow an ace. (That's the classic rule and it's what makes kings and aces so awkward.)
  3. Stuck? Turn a card from the stock to give yourself a new top card.
  4. You win by emptying the tableau, not by filling foundations — this is the only solitaire here that works that way.
  5. You can't build on the columns at all. The only place a card goes is the pile.

Questions

Why can't I play an ace on a king?

Because in traditional Golf the sequence doesn't wrap around. Ace is the bottom, king is the top, and neither one connects to the other. It's precisely this rule that makes kings dangerous — a king buried in the middle of a column can only be removed by a queen, and if the queens are gone, that column is finished.

How many Golf deals are winnable?

Not many, honestly — somewhere around one in ten or so with careful play. Golf is a game you lose most of the time, and it's meant to be. Each round takes a minute or two, so a loss costs you nothing and you just deal again. Think of it as putting practice, not the Open.

Any strategy?

Look for the long chains before you take the short one. A card that unlocks a run of five is worth more than the obvious card sitting right there. And keep an eye on the columns with buried kings — clear those early, or you'll never clear them at all.

The rest of the table

Same engine, different rulebooks. They're all free, and none of them want your email.

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