I always see people playing solitaire on their Windows systems, but it appears that the game is no longer included with Windows 10? Where can I find it and how do I play Microsoft Solitaire?
Your fear that Microsoft is no longer including Solitaire with the latest generation of Microsoft Windows is unfounded. Heck, as you point out, lots of people play solitaire on their Windows computers. Heck, as far back as 2008, researchers were stating that solitaire was “the most-used program in the Windows universe”. So there’s definitely a copy of the Solitaire program on your Windows 10 system. It’s just gotten a major facelift and upgrade.
Not only that, but you can choose between a number of major solitaire games, ranging from the traditional game Klondike to Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid and TriPeaks. Even better, you can now indicate that you only want “winning decks” of cards from which to play, letting the computer figure out how to quite literally stack the deck in your favor. It is solitaire, so it’s not like you’d be cheating anyone other than yourself, but we’ll get back to that in a bit, okay? 🙂
To start, simply do a search for “solitaire”:
There it is. The new version of Solitaire goes by the more formal name of Microsoft Solitaire Collection and it’s easy to launch: just click the matching entry in the search results.
The first time you launch it you might get a message that it needs to download some data — which is cool, it means that by default Windows 10 doesn’t take up valuable disk space with a game that people might not play — but once it is downloaded, you’ll get this as the main screen of the program forevermore:
As I said earlier, the real classic solitaire game goes by the name of Klondike, though there’s no clear reason why that’s the case other than some romantic stories about Alaskan gold miners that’s probably untrue. In any case, click on “Klondike” to get started and here’s what you’ll see:
You can see that you can choose between a random deck or various types of solvable decks. “Easy” isn’t easy enough? You can choose “draw 1” as the type of Klondike you want to play (note that’s specified at the top of the window and that the default game is “draw 3”, as is specified). As a gamer, however, I don’t really understand the appeal of a deck that you know gives you a solvable deck, particularly if you keep in mind that theoretically, at least, 79% of games are winnable. If you don’t play a perfect game, of course, your odds go down, but even if you’re terrible, you should still win 1 out of 3 or 1 out of 4 games or so. It’s your game, though, so if you want to play with a solvable deck, you can see it’s a pretty popular choice!
Whatever deck you choose, either click “Play Random” or “Play Solvable” and you’ll finally get the display you’ve been missing all this time:
You start the game by clicking on the deck on the top left, which will reveal three cards, the top-most of which you can move into play as desired:
Klondike is a game of card stacking, where the top four squares are used to stack cards in ascending order by suit, while the lower section lets you move cards around in descending order, alternating red and black suits.
Look above closely and you’ll see there are already a few moves available: the ace of hearts can be moved up to the top row, and then (this is a bit complicated) the four of diamonds can be moved onto the five of spades, which reveals the seven of clubs. Since it’s black, the six of hearts can be moved onto it, and then the five and four can be moved on too. Without even playing a single card yet, the playing surface now looks like this:
That’s basically the game. You want to move cards up to the top row as soon as possible (starting always with the ace of each suit), then move cards or stacks of cards from row to row along the bottom to keep exposing the facedown cards. You can always move down the faceup cards from the play deck (above it’s the four of clubs, queen of hearts and nine of diamonds) onto either the top row or the play on the lower section. Go through the play deck and you can spin through it again. Eventually, you either solve the game or realize that you cannot solve it. Game over.
One cool thing about Microsoft Solitaire Collection is that if you’re stumped, you can actually get hints, as shown in the menu:
Notice also the Daily Challenges and Star Club. Yeah, you can really get into Solitaire if that’s your thing!
Anyway, that’s how you get back to the popular world of Solitaire on Windows within Windows 10. Have fun, and just remember to do actual work once in a while. 🙂
Final tip: Arkadium, the company that wrote this version of Solitaire for Microsoft, has a terrific strategy guide you might want to check out too: Best Solitaire Strategy. I’ve been reading it too, because it’s darn interesting…