Golf Solitaire: the quickest game on the site
If you only have a few minutes, Golf is the one. Thirty-five cards lie face up in seven columns of five. One card starts on the foundation pile, and sixteen more wait in the stock. You clear the columns by playing cards onto the foundation one rank higher or lower than its top card. Suits do not matter. Clear all 35 and you have won.
That means a Golf game has a hard limit on its length: at most 35 cards from the columns and 16 turns of the stock. On this site there is also a friendly extra rule: a King can go on an Ace and an Ace on a King. We tested what that does. With the wrap, 92.7% of deals can be cleared, against 44.0% without it. And in the winning routes our solver found, only about 1.1 stock cards were left unused on average: you usually need nearly the whole stock.
A Golf game in numbers
| What we measured | With K↔A wrap (this site) | Without the wrap |
|---|---|---|
| Stock cards left unused in the solver's winning route | 1.08 of 16 (95% range 1.05–1.10) | 0.85 |
| Deals that can be cleared, playing perfectly | 92.7% (95% range 92.2–93.2%) | 44.0% |
| Deals where the first foundation card has no play at all | 27.4% | 31.2% |
| Deals won by a simple player that cannot see the stock | 22.4% | 3.2% |
| Deals tested | 10,000 | 3,000 |
Two things jump out. Almost every deal here is winnable, and most losses come from choices, not cards: a simple player that always went for the longest run it could see won only 22.4%.
Golf rules on solitaire-online.nz
- Layout. Seven columns of five cards, all face up. One card starts the foundation. Sixteen cards in the stock.
- Playing. The bottom card of any column can go on the foundation if it is one rank higher or lower. Suit does not matter.
- The wrap. A King may go on an Ace, and an Ace on a King.
- Stuck? Turn a card from the stock onto the foundation and carry on from that card.
- No redeal. When the stock is gone, the game ends.
- Winning. Clear all 35 cards from the columns. Stock cards left over do not matter.
How to make a short game a winning one
Look for the longest run, then look again
Before you play, trace how far you can go: a 6, then a 7 or a 5, then the next. Pick the path that clears the most cards and, just as important, leaves a card behind that can start another run.
Save the stock
Winning routes left only about one stock card spare. Every card you turn from the stock without needing to is one you may miss at the end.
Think about the wrap
Kings and Aces are no longer dead ends. A run can go Q, K, A, 2. Plan runs that pass through the wrap rather than stopping at it.
Awkward columns first
All five cards in every column are visible, so you can see which columns will be hardest to clear. Chip away at the awkward ones while you still have choices.
Phone, tablet or computer
Golf is ideal on a phone: tap a card and it goes. It works in any modern browser, with nothing to download and no account to create. The cards are large and clear, with a zoom control. Hint, unlimited Undo and Restart are always there, and the game tracks moves and time. Sound, fullscreen and table colour can all be changed.
What a Golf session looks like
A Golf game is a string of runs. You start from the foundation card, play as many column cards up and down as you can, then turn the stock when you are stuck and start a new run from that card. With sixteen stock cards, a game has at most sixteen of those restarts.
The winning routes our solver found left only about one stock card spare, so you should expect to need almost every restart. That is why the choice of which column card to play matters so much: a good run saves a stock card, and a saved stock card can be the difference at the end.
Because a game is so short, Golf is ideal for playing several deals in a row. Win or lose, a new deal is only a tap away.
How we did the research, step by step
The solitaire-online.nz team ran this in September 2026 to see how short a winning Golf game is on this site and how much the King-and-Ace wrap helps.
- We began with this site's game code. Seven columns of five face up, one card to start the foundation, a 16-card stock with no redeal, play one rank up or down regardless of suit. This site uses the easy variant, where King and Ace wrap. The game is won when the columns are clear.
- The game as a program. We wrote the game with the wrap switched on and, for comparison, off.
- Numbered deals. 10,000 deals with the wrap and 3,000 without, each from a numbered seed.
- Two players. An exhaustive solver that tries every possible line and knows the stock order, which gives an exact answer for each deal; and a simple greedy player that does not know the stock, always plays the card with the longest visible follow-on, and turns the stock only when stuck.
- The run. The solver settled every deal, with no "undecided" results.
- A published check. Without the wrap we got 44.0%. Blake & Gent, 2026 report 45.109% for Golf played that way. The two agree closely. We found no published figure for the wrap version.
- Error bars. A 95% range contains the answer 19 times in 20 if the test were repeated. With the wrap, the winnable share is 92.2% to 93.2%.
- Limits. The solver knows the order of the stock, which a player never does, so 92.7% is a ceiling. The unused-stock figure comes from the first winning route found, not necessarily the one that saves the most cards.
The technical side
The code is Python 3.11 using only the standard library, in a module called golf.py. The solver is an exhaustive depth-first search over the column heights, the position in the stock and the current foundation card. It keeps a memory of positions already known to be dead ends, which makes checking every line fast enough. runner.py spread the deals over 19 worker processes on a 20-core machine; the 10,000 wrap deals took about 12 minutes and the 3,000 no-wrap deals about 7.
The error bars are Wilson score intervals. We had help from Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, in writing and reviewing the Golf code and drafting this page. It produced none of the figures. Every figure comes from running the program, and the team checked the results against the published study.
By Admin, solitaire-online.nz. Study date: 18 September 2026.
Short answers before your next deal
Why do I lose more often than 92.7% suggests?
Because that figure comes from a solver that knows the order of the stock, which you never do. A simple player that could not see the stock won 22.4% of the same deals. Careful choices close much of that gap: plan the longest run, and try not to turn the stock until you have to.
How long does a game of Golf take?
It is the shortest game here: at most 35 plays from the columns plus 16 stock turns, so about fifty moves at the very most.
Does a King really go on an Ace here?
Yes, on this site Kings and Aces wrap round, in both directions.
How many Golf games can be won?
With the wrap and perfect play, 92.7% of deals. Without seeing the stock, you will win fewer, but careful planning closes much of the gap.
Is Golf good on a phone?
Very. One tap per card, and the layout fits a small screen well.
What else is quick?
Pyramid is another short one, and Baker's Solitaire games tend to be brief. The games page has the full line-up.