Play Saratoga Solitaire — Klondike With Nothing Hidden

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.

How Do You Play Saratoga?

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

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck.
• Tableau: seven columns of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 cards — 28 in all — every one face up.
• Foundations: four, empty. The Aces start in the tableau or the stock.
• Stock: the remaining 24 cards, turned three at a time to a waste. The waste may be recycled as often as you like.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down in alternating colours: a red 7 goes on a black 8.
• A packed run travels as a unit, exactly as in Klondike.
• Only a King, or a King-headed run, may enter an empty column.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• The stock turns three cards at a time, and there is no limit on redeals — recycle the waste as many times as you need.

Saratoga Strategy

Open information changes what skill means. In ordinary Klondike a good player plays the odds; here they solve a puzzle.

• Find the Aces before you move anything. You can see all four. Note how deep each one sits and which cards cover it, because the order you free them in usually decides the game before the tenth move.
• Work out what the King spaces are for. Only a King can take an empty column, so a column you can clear is worthless unless a King is reachable. Check which Kings are available and where they sit before spending moves on emptying anything.
• Do not bank a card the tableau still needs. The foundations are one-way. A red 4 in play can host a black 3; on the foundation it hosts nothing. With everything visible you can actually see whether that 3 exists and where it is, so use that.
• Count the stock in threes. Turning three at a time means only every third card reaches the top of the waste on any given pass. Recycling reorders which ones surface, so if a card you need is stuck in the middle of a group, play a card out of the waste first to shift the grouping.
• Unlimited redeals are not unlimited chances. If a full cycle of the stock produces no move, another cycle produces no move either — nothing has changed. Recognising that moment early is the real skill the open board teaches.

Saratoga, or Thoughtful

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. Numbers for Thoughtful circulate widely, and figures around eight in ten are often quoted for optimal play. None of the ones we can reach comes with a method and a sample size attached to this exact rule set — three cards turned, unlimited redeals — so this page does not quote one as fact. 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.