TrySolitaire May 2026: What 62,398 Games Tell Us

TrySolitaire Monthly: What 62,398 Games in May 2026 Tell Us

Published: June 2026 Data period: May 1–31, 2026 Sample: 62,398 games started, across 23 game variants Previous report: April 2026 →

May is the month we’ve been waiting for. We fixed our abandon tracking on April 14, so May is the first full month where we can see every game’s real ending — won, lost, or walked away from. That last category turns out to be the whole story.

For four months we’ve reported win rates and treated everything else as “not a win.” May lets us split that open. The result reframes how the site actually gets used.

Here’s what 62,398 games told us.

The Big Number

62,398 games started. 20,339 won. 32.6% overall win rate.

Volume grew 41% over April’s 44,117. That’s strong, but it’s not another doubling — February to March was +98%, March to April +101%. The doubling streak ended in May. Growth is still fast. It’s just no longer doubling, and we’d rather say that plainly than dress it up.

The more interesting shift is underneath the total, which we’ll get to in the popularity section.

Game Popularity

The headline isn’t that the site grew. It’s that Klondike stopped growing and everything else took off.

Klondike added just 6% after two months of near-doubling. Every other major game grew by triple digits. The result: Klondike fell from 81% of all games in April to 61% in May. A 20-point drop in one month. The site is no longer a Klondike site with some extras. It’s becoming a multi-game site.

FreeCell grew about 10x — 616 games to 6,242, now the third most-played game ahead of Mahjong. Two things drove it: FreeCell started ranking better in search, and we’re seeing a volume bump from players in China. Both are real and organic, not a tracking quirk. FreeCell gets its own deep-dive next week.

A few games went the other way. Scorpion fell from 270 starts to 18, Forty Thieves from 132 to 25. Both debuted strongly earlier this year and have now dropped below our 50-game reporting threshold, so we’re leaving their rates out this month rather than read into thin numbers.

Win Rates

Win rate is wins divided by total starts. Abandoned games count as non-wins. Same method we’ve used since February.

We’re showing May on its own this month, with no month-over-month column. The reason is the abandon fix on April 14. Earlier months undercounted abandoned games, which made win rates look higher than they really were. May is the first clean month. Comparing it to April would mix a tracking change with a real change, and we can’t separate the two. So treat these as a fresh, honest baseline.

FreeCell leads at 62.4%, climbing for the fourth straight month. FreeCell is a game where almost every deal is solvable, so a high rate is expected. The number now sits on a 6,242-game sample, which makes it solid.

Spider splits hard by suit. 1-suit wins 53.4%, 2-suit 33.8%, 4-suit 16.8%. The all-variant average of 42.1% hides a 2.5x spread between the easiest and hardest setting.

Mahjong Turtle wins 49.3%, but that number needs a caveat. Mahjong lets players reshuffle the board up to 5 times by default, which means a board headed for a loss can be reshuffled into a win. Open-ended card games like Klondike have no such option — a bad deal is just lost. So Mahjong’s win rate sits higher partly because of the shuffle mechanic, and it isn’t directly comparable to the card games above it. Players who want a truer test can turn shuffles off in settings.

Klondike Draw 1 reads 28.1%. Lower than the 30.3% we reported earlier this year, but that’s the abandon fix at work, not players getting worse. Earlier months simply didn’t count every abandoned game. 28.1% is the clean figure.

Where the Games Actually Go: Abandonment

This is the new section, and the reason May matters. For the first time we can split every start three ways:

Won: 32.6%. Lost: 4.6%. Abandoned: 62.8%.

Most games don’t end in a loss. They end in someone leaving.

That 4.6% loss number is strange until you look at where the losses come from. Almost all of them come from five games: Mahjong, TriPeaks, Golf, Pyramid, and 2048. Klondike recorded zero completed losses in May across 38,012 games. FreeCell zero. Spider two. Sudoku zero.

The reason is mechanical, not behavioral. Games fall into two types:

• Open-ended games (Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Sudoku) rarely declare you the loser. You get stuck, the board just sits there, and you leave. That shows up as an abandon.
• Forced-ending games (Golf, TriPeaks, Pyramid, 2048) end the round when you run out of moves. That shows up as a loss.

So a low abandon rate on Golf and a high one on Klondike aren’t measuring the same thing. They’re measuring how each game ends, not how committed its players are. The number that stays fair across every game is still the win rate.

Where abandonment does tell us something is within the open-ended games, where leaving is the only way to not win:

FreeCell is the stickiest game on the site. People who start it tend to finish it, which fits its rising win rate. Klondike is the opposite — three out of four games get abandoned. And since Klondike is 61% of all play, it sets the site-wide abandon rate almost by itself. That 75.7% lines up with something we found in our mobile vs desktop data: a lot of Klondike gets opened in a desktop tab and never really played.

Sections We’re Holding This Month

We usually run Speed & Efficiency, Winners vs. Non-winners, and Mobile vs. Desktop. They’re not here this month.

Those sections need game-by-game detail (move counts, timing, undo use, device) that comes from a different data source than the clean monthly totals above. That source is being reworked to cleanly separate TrySolitaire play from our sister sites. Rather than publish numbers we can’t fully stand behind, we’re holding these three sections and bringing them back next month. The figures in this report — totals, popularity, win rates, and abandonment — are all reconciled and clean.

Spotlight: FreeCell’s Breakout

One game ran away with May. FreeCell grew roughly 10x in volume and climbed to a 62.4% win rate at the same time. That combination — more players and more of them winning — is rare. Usually a flood of new players drags a win rate down as beginners arrive. FreeCell did the opposite.

Better search ranking brought new players in, and a wave of interest from China added to it. The win rate held up because FreeCell rewards thinking ahead, and the game is almost always solvable for a player willing to work the board. We’re giving FreeCell a full data portrait next week.

What’s Next

Now that we have a clean month of data, two posts that were on hold can finally run:

• Does using undo actually help you win? May is the first month with trustworthy undo data across every game.
• FreeCell: a full data portrait — the breakout game of the month gets a closer look.

The most-played game in May was, again, Klondike — though it’s holding a smaller slice of the table than it used to. Play it here →

All data is anonymous. TrySolitaire does not track individual users. Win rates are calculated as wins divided by total starts (treating abandons as non-wins). Games with fewer than 50 starts in May are excluded. Win rates for May are shown without a month-over-month comparison because abandon tracking was fixed on April 14, and earlier months are not directly comparable. Mahjong allows up to 5 reshuffles by default, which raises its win rate relative to games without that option. TriPeaks and Golf each include a smaller “standard” sub-variant we are still characterizing; their rates here are the game-level blend across all starts. Data covers May 1–31, 2026. See our April 2026 report for the previous month. For game rules and strategy, see our Klondike Solitaire Guide, FreeCell Guide, and Spider Solitaire Guide.

Published June 1, 2026 | TrySolitaire Blog · Play Free Solitaire