What makes a King 'dead' in this game?

Nothing may be played onto it. Once a King reaches the top of the waste the run stops there, and only a fresh card turned from the stock can start the chain again.

Does an Ace follow a King, or a King an Ace?

Neither. The ranks do not wrap in this game, so both ends of the rank order are dead ends in one direction. That is the base Golf rule; the wrapping version is a separate variant.

How is this different from the Golf in this catalogue?

This catalogue's Golf wraps King to Ace, which is the commoner digital house rule and matches what PySolFC calls Relaxed Golf. Dead King Golf is the strict reading: no wrap, and nothing on a King.

Do I build anything in the tableau?

No, never. The columns are only a source. Every card you play goes onto the single waste pile and never comes back, which is what makes this family unlike almost every other solitaire.

Are there foundations?

None at all. There is nothing to build up in suit from an Ace — the waste is the only destination, and you win by emptying all seven columns rather than by filling anything.

No. The stock turns one card at a time and once it is gone the game is decided. When no exposed card can be played and no card is left to turn, the position is genuinely finished.

Dead King Golf Solitaire - Play Online & 100% Free

Play Dead King Golf — Golf With Both Escape Routes Closed

Dead King Golf is the strict reading of Golf. The board is the same: thirty-five cards in seven columns of five, a stock of seventeen, and one card turned to open the waste. You play the exposed card of any column onto the waste when it is one rank above or below the waste's top card, suit ignored. What is different is what you cannot do. The ranks do not wrap, so a King and an Ace are strangers. And nothing at all may be played onto a King — a King reaching the waste stops the run dead until the stock turns something else. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Dead King Golf?

Goal: empty all seven columns.

Setup

Deck: one standard 52-card deck.
Tableau: seven columns of five cards, all face up (35 cards).
Stock: the remaining cards, turned one at a time. One is dealt to the waste before play begins.
Waste: one pile, and the only place any card can go.
No foundations and no redeal.

Rules

Play the exposed card of any column onto the waste when it is exactly one rank above or below the waste's top card. Suit is ignored.
The ranks do not wrap. A King does not follow an Ace, and an Ace does not follow a King.
Nothing may be played onto a King. Once a King is on top of the waste, only a fresh card from the stock can continue the game.
A card on the waste never comes back. There is no building in the tableau at all.
Turn the stock one card at a time. There is no redeal.
You win when every column is empty.

Dead King Golf Strategy

Everything is visible from the first second, so this is a planning game. The two restrictions turn it into a game about Kings.

Count your Kings before you move. Four Kings are somewhere in the columns, and each one is a wall: playing it to the waste ends the run. Note where they sit and how deep, because a King at the bottom of a column is a very different problem from one on top.
Play from the deepest column first. Every column must reach zero, and the deepest one has the least slack. When two cards are both playable, take the one that shortens the longest column.
Do not spend a King casually. Playing a King is often the only way to reach what is beneath it, but it costs you the rest of the run. Do it at the end of a run, never in the middle of one.
Watch for the Ace-King seam. Because the ranks do not wrap, an Ace on the waste can only be followed by a 2. If your remaining low cards are all Aces, that is a warning sign — one of them will strand the run.
Count the stock. Seventeen cards is not many, and each one is a fresh start after a King. Spending them early to fish for a lucky match is how a winnable board becomes a lost one.

Dead King Golf and the Golf Family

Dead King Golf is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Golf variant, and its class does exactly one thing: it declares a strictness level, which the shared waste rule reads. The relevant lines are worth quoting because they are the whole game: "if the game's strictness is 1: nothing on a King", and then the ordinary comparison — the incoming card is one rank above or one rank below the top of the waste.

The no-wrap half is not a change at all; it is what the base game has always done. The wrap is added by a separate variant, Relaxed Golf, which sets the rank arithmetic to fold round at thirteen. That is worth stating plainly here because this catalogue's own Golf wraps — it plays the relaxed rule, which is the commoner digital house rule and the one most players expect. Dead King Golf is the strict game, and the distance between the two is exactly the two restrictions above.

Golf itself is a curious member of the solitaire canon: there are no foundations, nothing is ever built in the tableau, and the whole game is one long chain of cards onto a single pile. The nearest thing to it elsewhere in this catalogue is Black Hole, which plays the same one-pile chain from seventeen fans and no stock at all.

For the two-deck version of the same strict rule, play Double Golf.

One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Dead King Golf balanced, and no published win rate for it that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally it is clearly harder than the wrapping game: the wrap alone joins the two ends of the rank order, and the King rule removes four cards' worth of continuation on top of that.