pips&pegs

Yukon Solitaire

No stock. No luck. Lift any card you can see, and everything on top comes with it.

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Yukon looks like Klondike and plays nothing like it. There's no stock pile — every card you're ever going to get is on the table from the first second. And the signature rule: you may pick up any face-up card, and whatever is piled on top of it comes along for the ride, in whatever order it happens to be.

That one rule changes everything. In Klondike you're waiting for the deck to give you something. In Yukon there's nothing to wait for, and every position is a puzzle you can, in principle, solve. Which means when you lose, you really did lose — a fact Yukon players enjoy far more than they should.

How Yukon Solitaire works

  1. Build down in alternating colours, same as Klondike — a red six on a black seven.
  2. Lift any face-up card along with every card resting on it, whether or not they form a sequence. This is the whole game.
  3. Only kings (and their attendant baggage) go into empty columns.
  4. There is no stock. What you see is everything you get.
  5. Foundations build up by suit from the ace, as always.

Questions

What makes Yukon different from Klondike?

Two things, and they're big. There's no stock — no drawing, no redeals, no luck after the shuffle. And you can move any face-up card together with all the cards on top of it, even when they're a jumble. In Klondike you'd need a perfect descending alternating run to move a stack. In Yukon you just pick it up.

Are Yukon deals usually winnable?

Most of them are — the estimate hovers around 80–90%, higher than Klondike, because you can see everything and manoeuvre freely. But that cuts both ways: a lost game in Yukon is genuinely your mistake, and the undo button will let you go and find it.

What's the one piece of advice?

Expose the face-down cards. Every card still face-down is information you don't have, and Yukon is a game of information. Prefer the move that flips a card over the move that tidies up something already visible — almost every time.

The rest of the table

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

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