Saratoga is Klondike with the covers taken off. The same seven-column staircase is dealt, the same alternating-colour building applies, the same three cards turn from the stock — but every card in the tableau is face up from the first second. Its older name says what that does: Thoughtful. Nothing is concealed, so nothing that goes wrong can be blamed on a card you could not see. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
Open information changes what skill means. In ordinary Klondike a good player plays the odds; here they solve a puzzle.
The idea of playing Klondike with everything visible is old, and the older name for it is Thoughtful — a description rather than a title. The PySol Fan Club collection registers the game as Saratoga and keeps Thoughtful as an alternative name, and its implementation is a single idea expressed in two lines: take Klondike, turn three cards at a time, and deal the whole staircase face up.
The open board matters more than it sounds. Ordinary Klondike is famously part luck: a player can make every correct decision and still lose to a card buried where no reasoning could have found it. Thoughtful removes that excuse without changing a single rule, which is why it has been used as the fair comparison in solver studies of Klondike — the difference between the two win rates is a measure of how much the hidden cards are worth.
Within this catalogue, Saratoga's closest relative in spirit is Whitehead, which also deals the whole staircase face up but builds in the same colour and opens its spaces to any card. Trigon keeps Klondike's hidden cards and changes the build to suit instead. For the game Saratoga is made from, play Klondike.
One honest note on difficulty. A solver study found about 82% of Draw 3 deals winnable when every card is known and redeals are unlimited (Blake & Gent, 2026). That is a ceiling for perfect play by a program, not a human win rate. PySolFC rates the game balanced. What is certain is that it is easier than Klondike by exactly the value of the information the deal gives you, and that a loss here is genuinely a loss you made.
Because with every card face up there is nothing left to guess and everything left to think about. Thoughtful is the older, descriptive name; Saratoga is the name the PySol Fan Club collection registers it under, and both refer to the same game.
Only the deal. The staircase, the alternating-colour building, the King-only spaces, the three-card turn and the unlimited redeals are all Klondike's. Saratoga simply turns every tableau card face up, which removes the luck of the hidden cards.
Three at a time. That means only every third card reaches the top of the waste on any given pass, so playing a card off the waste to shift the grouping is a real technique here.
Yes, as often as you like — there is no limit. But if a whole cycle produces no playable card, another cycle will not either, because nothing on the board has changed.
Only a King, or a run headed by a King. This is Klondike's rule unchanged, and it means clearing a column is only worth doing when you have a King ready to occupy it.
Yes, because you can see every card and plan around it rather than guessing. How much easier is exactly the value of the hidden information, which is why open Klondike is used as the fair comparison in solver studies.