TrySolitaire September 2026: What 176,254 Games Tell Us

TrySolitaire Monthly: What 176,254 Games in September 2026 Tell Us

Published: October 2026 Data period: September 1–30, 2026 Sample: 176,254 games started, across more than 70 game variants Previous report: August 2026 →

For seven months the story of this site has been Klondike. It was 81% of all play in April. In September, Klondike held steady — and the site grew anyway.

Here’s what 176,254 games told us.

The Big Number

176,254 games started. 67,332 won. 38.2% overall win rate.

That’s up 19% on August’s 147,673. September has one fewer day, so on a daily basis the growth is 23%: 5,875 games a day against 4,764.

The win rate is unchanged. July 38.2%, August 37.6%, September 38.2%. Three months on the same tracking, three months at the same number.

Week one averaged 5,016 games a day. Week three averaged 6,461. More players arrived in the middle of the month, and daily starts stayed above 6,000 from September 14 on.

Game Popularity

Klondike fell 3%, but only because September is a day shorter. Per day it was flat: 2,163 games a day against 2,148 in August. Its share of all play dropped from 45% to 37%. In April it was 81%.

Spider is now one game in five. 33,255 starts, up 46%. Spider has grown every month this year, but September is the first time it broke away from the pack. Nearly half the growth is 2-suit, which more than doubled from 4,344 to 9,301 games. 1-suit grew 36%; 4-suit was flat.

FreeCell’s August dip is gone. 24,808 games, a new high, up 26%. Last month looked like a peak. It was a pause.

Belote went from 183 games to 3,196. It launched in August with the batch of trick-taking games and found an audience in September — French-speaking players, mainly. That’s enough to make it the eighth most-played game on the site in its first full month. More below.

Eight Off fell 74%. Last month’s spotlight game dropped from 730 games to 189. Its win rate slipped too (86% to 75%) and its abandon rate rose from 14% to 25%. We don’t know why August was high or why September was low. It stays on the list of games to watch.

Mahjong grew 52%, with a caveat. We saw a spike in Mahjong games opened with no moves made this month, and some of those count as starts. Mahjong’s growth is real, but the number is noisier than the others.

Win Rates

Win rate is wins divided by total starts. Abandoned games count as non-wins. Both months here are on the same tracking.

Games under 50 starts, and a handful of games with zero recorded wins on small samples, are left out.

FreeCell is at 62.2%, up four points, on its biggest month ever. More players and more of them winning, which is the combination FreeCell keeps producing.

Klondike Draw 1 held at 35.0%. Three months at 33–35% on 40,000-plus games each. That’s the number. Draw 3 rose again, to 17.9% — it was 10.9% in June and has climbed every month since.

Spider’s 2-suit rate held while its volume doubled. When a game’s volume doubles in a month, the win rate usually falls, because newcomers lose more. 2-suit went from 33.0% to 34.1% on 9,301 games. Whoever is arriving at 2-suit is playing it well.

A note on Spider: every Spider game in this report was played under a rule we have since corrected. Until 3 October 2026, our 2- and 4-suit Spider let a run of mixed suits move as one unit, which the standard rules do not allow. The 2- and 4-suit figures here, and the Spider totals that include them, describe that easier game. The game now follows the standard rule, so its 2- and 4-suit games are harder.

Forty Thieves jumped to 11.6% — 75 wins from 649 games. It was 0% in July and 4.8% in August.

2048 went from 0.8% to 6.0%. 106 wins from 1,771 games. Nothing changed in the game; this looks like a more engaged set of players reaching the 2048 tile.

Where the Games Go: Won, Lost, Abandoned

Site-wide, across every game with 50 or more starts:

Abandonment is down two points. Part of that is a tracking improvement: in September we fixed loss detection across the site, so games that previously sat unfinished until the player left are now recorded as lost when no moves remain. Russian recorded 96 completed losses this month against zero in August. Yukon, Osmosis, Simple Simon and Spaces & Aces also recorded losses for the first time. So some of the drop in “abandoned” is games moving into “lost,” not players behaving differently.

Open-ended games:

Klondike’s abandon rate has now read 70.7%, 70.6% and 69.8% in three consecutive months. Seven in ten Klondike games get opened and left. FreeCell is the stickiest big game and got stickier.

Forced-ending games:

Last month all five of these rose together and we said we’d look at it. The rise held. None of them went back to July levels. Golf and TriPeaks edged up again; Pyramid and 2048 came down slightly. Mahjong rose again, but its abandon number includes the no-move opens mentioned above, so we don’t read much into it.

Speed & Efficiency

Average duration and moves across September games with timing data. Durations are excluded where more than 5% of plays ran over an hour (Sudoku, 2048, Forty Thieves), and for Spider, where a small number of games recorded durations we don’t believe.

Belote’s five moves in sixteen minutes is a different kind of game: each “move” is a whole round of eight tricks, and most of the time is spent deciding.

Winners vs. Non-Winners

Klondike winners are using a bit more undo. 1.7 per game, up from 1.4 in August, 1.3 in July and 1.0 in June: the third month running that the number has moved up. It is still below April’s 1.9. Moves (94) and time (10.5 minutes) are where they’ve always been.

FreeCell, Pyramid, Golf, Eight Off and Forty Thieves winners have no undo figure. These five games did not send us their undo count when a game was won, so their winners’ undo read zero, or close to it, whatever the player did. Earlier reports read that zero as the way their winners play. It was a gap in our tracking.

Spider winners average 6.2 undos, the highest since the spring, when 4-suit was a bigger share of play. This month the rise comes with more 2-suit play: 2-suit went from 19% of Spider games to 28%. Some of the rise may be that change in the mix, not a change in how players play.

Sudoku winners used 0.3 hints per game. That was 1.3 in April and 0.5 in August, and its players are using hints less each month. Sudoku was the only game that sent its hint count when a game was won, so we can’t compare its hint use with the other games.

Spider winner duration is excluded this month. It read over two hours, against 21 minutes in August, and we’re checking the data.

Mobile vs. Desktop

Mobile is now one play in nine. It was one in three in March. The fall has been steady every month, and it’s confirmed by two separate tables. The site’s growth since spring has come almost entirely from desktop players.

Mobile share by game, among games with at least one move: 2048 37%, Pyramid 34%, Sudoku 24%, Klondike 16%, Russian 12%, FreeCell 8%, Spider 7%, Mahjong 6%, TriPeaks 6%, Golf 2%.

Win rate by device (games with 50+ starts on both devices and at least one move made):

This table only counts games where at least one move was made, which is why the rates read higher than the win-rate table above. We changed to this method in September, so these gaps are not comparable to the August table, which included games opened and left untouched.

On this measure mobile players win more in nearly every game. That isn’t a sign that phones are better for solitaire. It’s a sign of who’s left on mobile: as mobile share has fallen, the players still there are the committed ones, and committed players finish games.

Last month we flagged Pyramid and TriPeaks on mobile as a problem, with win rates around 8%. On this month’s stricter measure, Pyramid mobile players win 35% and TriPeaks 49%, level with or above desktop. Some of that is the method change. We’ll keep both games on the watch list until we have two months on the same measure.

New Games: First Full Month

The games that arrived in August now have a full month behind them.

Belote is the story. 3,196 games, 1,369 wins, 2,392 games played to the end. Its abandon rate dropped from 64% in its launch month to 25%, which is lower than any of the big solitaire games except Golf and TriPeaks. Belote found its players — largely in French — and they’re staying for whole games.

Rummy 500 is the other one that stuck: 287 games at a 54% win rate, with mobile players winning 81% of theirs.

A second wave arrived in September — Spaces & Aces (265 starts), Osmosis (181), Simple Simon (134), Waning Moon (85) and Russian Spider (76) among them. Early days. We’ll report on them when they’ve settled.

Spotlight: The Site Is No Longer a Klondike Site

In April, 81 of every 100 games on TrySolitaire were Klondike. In September, 37 were.

That didn’t happen because Klondike lost players. Counting every game dealt, Klondike went from 44,217 in April to 72,685 in September. It happened because everything else grew around it: Spider went from 5,089 to 39,351, and FreeCell from 1,099 to 27,258. Mahjong grew too, though its April count also held our sister site’s games. Three games that were rounding errors in the spring now account for 45% of play between them, more than Klondike.

The practical effect is that the site’s overall numbers are less and less a reflection of one game. The 38% site-wide win rate used to be Klondike’s win rate with some noise. Now it’s a blend of a 30% game, a 48% game and a 62% game, weighted by how many people chose each.

If you’ve only played Klondike here, the other two-thirds of the site is worth a look. Play Spider → · Play FreeCell →

What’s Next

October brings the eighth monthly report.

Coming posts:

• FreeCell: a full data portrait — 24,808 games in a month and a 62% win rate. The biggest game on the site after Klondike and Spider gets its own post.
• Does using undo actually help you win? — in the games whose wins recorded undo.

The most-played game in September was Klondike, for the eighth month running — though the gap is closing. 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 a month are excluded from win-rate tables, as are games with zero recorded wins on small samples. Word and memory games are excluded from solitaire tables. Mahjong win rate is for the Turtle layout only; Mahjong allows up to 5 reshuffles by default, which raises its win rate relative to games without that option. Mahjong start and abandon counts for September include a spike in boards opened with no moves made. Loss detection was improved in September, which moves some games from “abandoned” to “lost” relative to earlier months. Every September Spider game was played under the mixed-suit rule we corrected on 3 October 2026, which made 2- and 4-suit easier. Durations are averaged over games with timing data; games where more than 5% of plays exceeded one hour, and Spider, have durations excluded this month. FreeCell, Pyramid, Golf, Eight Off and Forty Thieves did not send their undo count when a game was won, so their winners’ undo figures are left out; Sudoku was the only game that sent its hint count on a win. Totals, win rates and abandon rates count each game on the day it ended; the Winners vs. Non-Winners table counts games by the day they started, so its counts can differ slightly from the win-rate table. Device win rates count only games with at least one move made and are not comparable to the August device table. Growth from April counts every game dealt, played or not, because a tracking fix on April 14 raised the share of games that sent us an ending. Data covers September 1–30, 2026. See our August 2026 report for the previous month. For game rules and strategy, see our Klondike Solitaire Guide, FreeCell Guide, and Spider Solitaire Guide.

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