How to Play Golf Solitaire (Rules and Strategy)

Golf Solitaire is one of the fastest, lowest-stress solitaire variants out there — five minutes per hand, simple rules, and a scoring system that copies actual golf where lower is better. You move cards onto a single waste pile based on one rule (a card adjacent in rank to the top of the waste pile), and you try to empty the tableau before the stock runs out. Here’s how to play.

What you need

One standard 52-card deck. No jokers. A flat surface or a browser tab. Pen and paper if you want to track scores across multiple hands (the game scales naturally to nine- or eighteen-hand “rounds” matching golf format).

The setup

Deal seven tableau columns, left to right, each with five cards face-up overlapping (so all 35 cards are visible). The cards in each column overlap so only the bottom card (the last one dealt) is fully exposed at the start.

• Tableau: 35 cards in 7 columns of 5 cards each, all face-up.
• Stock: 16 cards face-down to the side.
• Waste: 1 card from the stock dealt face-up to start the waste pile.

The waste pile is the single column you’ll be moving cards onto. The stock is a reserve you draw from when no tableau moves are possible.

The goal

Move all 35 tableau cards onto the waste pile. If you do, you’ve completed the hole. If the stock runs out before the tableau is cleared, the hand ends and you score by the number of cards still in the tableau.

How to play

The basic move

You can move any exposed tableau card (the bottom card in any column, or any card revealed by previous moves) onto the waste pile if its rank is one above or one below the current top card of the waste pile. Suits don’t matter.

For example, if the waste pile shows a 7, you can move any 6 or any 8 from the tableau onto it. After that move, the new top of the waste pile is whatever card you just moved, and the next move must be adjacent to that.

This creates a sequencing puzzle: you’re effectively building a long ascending-descending run on the waste pile, snaking up and down the ranks as you find adjacent cards. A run might go 7, 8, 9, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 5 — any direction works at any point.

Aces and Kings (standard rules)

In the standard rules, ranks wrap: Ace is one below 2 and one above King (or in some variants, Ace is only below 2, and a King is the “ceiling” with nothing above it). The wrap-around rule changes which moves are legal at the top and bottom of the rank cycle.

The two common conventions:

Strict (no wrap): A King has no card above it; you can only move a Queen onto a King, not an Ace. An Ace has nothing below it; you can only move a 2 onto an Ace. When you play a King or Ace, you’ve effectively put a wall on the waste pile, and you must draw from stock to continue.

Permissive (Ace wraps): Ace is both one below 2 and one above King. You can chain runs through the rank-cycle endpoints. Significantly more forgiving; not the standard rule.

Most modern Golf implementations use the strict rule by default. Some let you toggle.

Drawing from stock

When you can’t (or don’t want to) move any tableau card, flip the top card of the stock onto the waste pile. It becomes the new top of the waste, and you continue playing from there. The stock has 16 cards, so you can do this at most 16 times per hand.

Ending the hand

The hand ends when either:

• You move the last tableau card onto the waste pile (you “made the hole” — a perfect game).
• The stock runs out and you have no legal moves left.

Either way, the hand is over. Score by the cards remaining.

Scoring

Golf scoring is named after the sport — lower is better. The simplest rule: count the cards left in the tableau at the end of the hand. That’s your score. Clearing the tableau is a “hole-in-one” and scores zero (or sometimes negative one to reward perfection).

For a full “round,” play nine consecutive hands (a nine-hole round) or eighteen (an eighteen-hole round) and sum your scores. The lowest total wins. This is the format that turns Golf Solitaire from a single-hand novelty into a longer-form game.

Some variants assign negative points for cards left in the stock at the end (encouraging you to chain efficiently) or bonus points for streaks of consecutive same-direction moves. House rules vary.

Common variants

• Putt Putt: A more permissive Golf variant where Ace wraps around to King. Significantly easier.
• Black Hole: A close cousin where the tableau is laid out differently (cards in a hexagonal or scattered layout) and the same adjacent-rank move rule applies. Different setup, similar gameplay logic.
• Pyramid Golf: Golf-rules adjacent-rank movement applied to a pyramid-shaped tableau like Pyramid Solitaire.
• Three-card-draw Golf: When you can’t move, you draw three cards from stock at once. Faster, easier, less skill-driven.

Strategy basics

Look at the whole tableau before moving

The single best Golf habit: before making any move, scan all seven exposed bottoms and identify the cards in nearby ranks to your current waste top. The move that looks obvious (move a 6 onto a 7) might block a longer chain than the move that looks worse (move an 8 onto the 7, which then lets you chain three more cards).

Plan chains, not single moves

Golf rewards multi-move chains. If your waste pile shows a 7 and you have a 6, an 8 in another column, and a 9 in a third, you can chain three cards in one play (6-7-8-9 or 7-6-5 going the other direction). Identify chains and execute them before drawing from stock.

Save stock draws for genuine dead ends

You only have 16 stock cards. Every draw is a finite resource. Don’t draw when there’s still a tableau move available, even a bad-looking one. Drawing is the action you fall back on when there is genuinely no legal move.

Crack open the highest-value columns first

The bottom card in each tableau column blocks the four cards above it. If you can clear that bottom card, you reveal the next one, and so on. Identify which columns have the most accessible chains and work down those.

Plan for the Kings and Aces

In strict rules, a King or Ace on the waste pile is a dead end — only one specific card can move onto it next. Don’t play a King or Ace from the tableau unless you’re sure your next move (either a Queen or a 2 respectively, or a stock draw) will continue the chain. Otherwise you’re walling yourself off.

Golf vs other quick solitaires

Golf is one of the fastest solitaire variants. A hand takes 3-5 minutes. The win rate is modest (5-15%) which means most hands won’t be perfect, but the format encourages playing many hands rather than agonizing over one. This is a substantively different rhythm from Klondike (longer hands, more strategy per move) or Spider (much longer hands, much more planning).

If you want a 30-minute solitaire session, you can play 6-10 hands of Golf, score them all, and have a meaningful round-by-round comparison. Other variants don’t lend themselves to that format as cleanly.

For more solo card games and how they compare, see our games like Solitaire guide and the best single-player card games roundup.

Where Golf comes from

Golf Solitaire’s origins are unclear — it’s a folk variant that emerged in the early or mid-20th century. The name and the lower-is-better scoring obviously come from the sport. The game became more widely known through inclusion in solitaire books from the 1960s onward and through Microsoft Solitaire-era software collections that bundled Golf with Klondike, Spider, and FreeCell. Wikipedia’s Golf solitaire page covers the variants in detail.

Frequently asked questions

Can every Golf Solitaire game be won?

No. Most can’t, in fact. Golf has a low win rate — around 5-15% in standard strict rules, somewhat higher with permissive Ace-wraps. The game is designed for many-hand scoring rather than expecting individual hand wins.

What’s the best strategy in Golf Solitaire?

Plan multi-move chains before making any single move. Don’t draw from stock unless you have no tableau moves left. Identify which columns can be opened by chains you can execute now. Avoid playing Kings or Aces when they would dead-end you.

Do suits matter in Golf Solitaire?

No. Only rank matters. A 5 of any suit can move onto a 4 or 6 of any other suit. This is what makes Golf much simpler than most solitaire variants — no color-tracking, no suit-tracking.

What’s the scoring in Golf?

Like real golf, lower is better. Count cards remaining in the tableau at the end of each hand; that’s your score. Clearing the tableau is a “hole-in-one” worth zero. Sum scores across multiple hands for a round total.

Is Golf Solitaire easier than Klondike?

The rules are simpler, but the win rate is much lower (5-15% vs Klondike’s 30-50%). Golf is easier to learn and harder to win consistently. The pace is faster, which is partly why the format works for nine- or eighteen-hand rounds.

The bottom line

Golf Solitaire is the fast-format, low-stress solitaire variant where individual hands rarely win but the cumulative round-by-round scoring keeps it engaging. The adjacent-rank movement rule is one of the simplest in solitaire, and the strategy is all about chain planning rather than long-form tableau management. Open a free browser Golf game, play nine hands, score yourself, and see if you can break 100. When you want a break from the cards, the Chrome Dino game is one tab away — even fewer rules, still satisfying.