Play Roslin Solitaire — Yukon, Built Both Ways

Roslin is Yukon with one restriction lifted. The board is identical: a single face-up card in the first column, then six columns growing to eleven, with hidden bases underneath and everything else in plain sight. The famous Yukon move rule is unchanged — any face-up card may be picked up and carried with every card sitting on it, in any order at all. What changes is the building: instead of placing only the next rank down, you may build up or down by one, as long as the colours alternate. That roughly doubles where every card can go. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Roslin?

Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck. No stock and no redeal.
• Tableau: seven columns holding 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 cards. The first column is a single face-up card; each column after it has five face up over a deepening hidden base — 21 hidden cards in all.
• Foundations: four, empty.

Rules

• Any face-up card may be moved, and it carries every card on top of it — packed or not, in any order. This is the rule that defines the whole Yukon line.
• Build tableau columns UP OR DOWN by one in alternating colours: on a black 8 you may place a red 7 or a red 9.
• Nothing wraps. A King has no card above it and an Ace none below.
• Only a King, with its tail, may enter an empty column.
• A hidden card turns up the moment play exposes it.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.

Roslin Strategy

Two-way building on a board where anything can be lifted makes almost every move legal. The skill is entirely in choosing which of them to make.

• Freedom is not progress. You can nearly always shuffle cards from one column to another. Before each move, ask what it actually achieves: does it turn a hidden card, free an Ace, or empty a column? If the answer is none of those, look again.
• Turn hidden cards above everything. Twenty-one cards start face down, and the deepest column hides six of them. Until they are visible you are planning around a board you cannot see.
• Use the upward build to unbury, not to tidy. Being able to place a 9 on an 8 is most valuable as a parking space — somewhere to put an awkward card so you can reach what is under it. Building long two-way runs for their own sake buries the cards you will need.
• An empty column is a King's, and it is precious. Only a King and its tail may enter. That makes clearing the short left-hand columns the natural opening, but only if you have a King ready.
• Do not bank low cards too eagerly. Foundations are one-way. A red 4 in play now accepts a black 3 and a black 5, which on this board is unusually useful.

Roslin in the Yukon Family

Roslin is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Yukon variant, and its class is a single line: swap the tableau stack for one that tests the rank gap in both directions. Its own help text states the game exactly — "Build up or down by alternate color, can move any face-up cards regardless of sequence." Nothing else changes, so the board, the deal, the King rule and the absence of a stock are all Yukon's.

That relationship has a precedent in the same family. Alaska stands to Russian Solitaire exactly as Roslin stands to Yukon: one direction of building becomes two, and everything else is untouched. Playing Yukon and Roslin back to back is the cleanest way to feel what that single change is worth on a board where every face-up card is already movable.

Within this catalogue its other neighbours change a different rule each. Moosehide builds down in any suit but the card's own; Ukrainian Solitaire opens the empty columns to any card; Brisbane drops the suit rule entirely.

One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Roslin that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally it should be more forgiving than Yukon — twice the destinations for every card — but the hidden cards and the King rule are unchanged, and those are what usually decide a Yukon game.