Yukon Solitaire: no stock, about 97 moves to a win

Yukon deals every card at the start. There is no stock and no waste pile, just seven columns and four foundations. The big twist is how cards move: you can pick up any face-up card and move it together with everything on top of it, whether or not those cards are in order. That makes Yukon feel roomy and open, even though you start with plenty of cards face down.

With no stock to turn through, a Yukon game is compact. When our computer player won, it took 96.9 moves on average, the shortest win of any game we tested with that kind of player. The catch is that it did not win often, and in a typical game it only got 7.4 cards onto the foundations.

That gap is mostly down to the player, not the game. A solver that could see the hidden cards won at least 67.0% of deals.

Yukon at a glance

Read the solver row as a range: somewhere between 67.0% and 96.6% of Yukon deals can be won with perfect play. Our simple player reaches only a small slice of that, so treat its 4.5% as a floor.

Yukon rules on solitaire-online.nz

• Deal. Seven columns holding 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 cards. The first column is a single face-up card; in the others the bottom five cards are face up.
• Moving. Any face-up card can be moved, along with every card on top of it, onto a card one rank higher in the opposite colour.
• Turning cards. When the last face-up card leaves a column, the card beneath turns over.
• Empty columns. Only a King, with whatever sits on it, can go into an empty column.
• Foundations. Build each suit from Ace to King. There is no stock, so every card you need is already in the columns.

Keeping a Yukon game short

Aim every move at a hidden card

Each column hides between none and six cards. A move that turns one over gives you new information; a move that just shuffles face-up cards usually does not.

Use the big move on purpose

Being able to lift a card with a messy pile on top is Yukon's gift. It is also how you bury things. Before you move a pile, check what is underneath the card you are placing it on.

Buried Aces matter less than you think

Our player won 4.4% of games with two or more Aces face down and 4.5% with none or one. In Yukon, how you dig matters more than where the Aces start.

Kings are keys

Only Kings open empty columns. Work out early which King you can free, and where it will go.

Phone, tablet or computer

Yukon runs in any modern browser, with no download and nothing to sign up for. Tap a card and then where it goes, or drag it. The cards are big and clear, and you can zoom in further. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are there whenever you want them. The game counts your moves and time, so you can see how you compare with the 97-move mark. You choose the sound, fullscreen and table colour.

What a Yukon session looks like

Yukon has no stock, so a game is all about the columns. The opening is where most of the work happens: you use the big move to shift piles and turn over face-down cards as fast as you can. Once the hidden cards are out, the game either opens up quickly or grinds to a halt.

That makes Yukon a good game for a short break. There are no laps of the stock to wait through, and our player's Yukon wins were the shortest of any game where we counted its moves. If a deal is going nowhere after the first round of digging, it is often worth an Undo or two before you give up.

Across all its games, including the losses, our player got 7.4 cards home on average. A person who plans each big move will usually do a good deal better.

How we did the research, step by step

The solitaire-online.nz team ran this study in September 2026, looking at how compact a Yukon game is and how many deals can really be won.

1. We began with this site's game code. Columns of 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 cards with the last five face up, no stock, any face-up card moves with everything on it onto one rank higher in the opposite colour, Kings only into empty columns.
2. The game as a program. We wrote Yukon and its close cousin Alaska into the same simulation, so the two can be compared on equal terms.
3. Numbered deals. 10,000 deals for the computer player and 500 for the solver, each shuffled from a numbered seed so the test can be repeated exactly.
4. Two players. A computer player that sees only face-up cards, never undoes, and looks up to 300 positions ahead; and a solver that sees every card, including the face-down ones.
5. The run. The computer player played all 10,000 deals. The solver was allowed up to 50,000 positions per deal.
6. Published figures. We could not find a published winnability figure for Yukon, so the solver's range is our own.
7. Error bars. A 95% range is the band the result would fall in 19 times out of 20 if we ran it again with new deals. For moves per win it is 96.5 to 97.4.
8. Limits. Our computer player is weak at Yukon, so its win rate is a floor. The solver left 29.6% of deals undecided within its limit, which is why we give a range and not one number. The move count only covers games the player won.

The technical side

The simulation is Python 3.11 with the standard library alone. Yukon lives in yukon.py, which also handles Alaska. The computer player runs a look-ahead of up to 300 positions over the cards it can see, scoring 60 points per card on the foundations, taking 20 off per hidden card, and adding or subtracting a little for well-built and badly built links. The solver is a depth-first search, capped at 50,000 positions per deal, that makes only foundation moves that can never hurt automatically. runner.py spread the work over 19 worker processes: the 10,000 player games took about 2 minutes, and the 500 solver deals about 8.

The 95% ranges use the Wilson score interval. We worked with Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, to write and review the Yukon code and to draft this page. The AI did not produce any figures. They all come from running the code, and the team reviewed them before publishing.

By Admin, solitaire-online.nz. Study date: 18 September 2026.

Short answers before your next deal

Should I move a big pile or a small one?

Whichever turns over a face-down card. Our player's scoring counted each hidden card as a cost, and that simple rule served it well. A big move that uncovers nothing is usually a wasted move, however tidy it looks.

How long is a game of Yukon?

Our player's wins averaged 96.9 moves. With no stock to turn through, Yukon games tend to be tighter than Klondike.

Can most Yukon games be won?

With perfect knowledge, at least 67.0% and perhaps as many as 96.6%. Playing blind, as we all do, it takes careful digging.

Can a messy pile move in one go?

Yes. Any face-up card can be moved with everything on top of it, as long as the card you pick up fits where you put it.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes, in any modern browser. The long columns are easier to read with zoom.

Games that feel like Yukon

Alaska uses the same deal with a same-suit twist. Klondike is the game Yukon grew from. Every game is on the games page.