Yukon Solitaire: no stock, big moves, and a lot more winnable than it feels

Yukon is the solitaire for people who like to see their options laid out. There's no stock pile at all: every card is dealt to the table at the start, most of them face up. And you can move almost anything — any face-up card can be picked up along with everything sitting on top of it, whether or not those cards are in order.

That freedom is both the fun and the trap. Our simple computer player, which looks only at the visible cards and never undoes, won just 4.5% of 10,000 games. Yet when a solver was allowed to see every face-down card, it proved at least 67% of deals winnable. The gap between those numbers is where a thoughtful player lives.

Yukon, measured

So somewhere between 67% and about 97% of Yukon deals can be won with perfect knowledge, and only a few percent are hopeless. Casual play wins far fewer. Please read the bot figure carefully: our Yukon bot is a weak player, and its 4.5% shows how unforgiving the game is when you can't plan ahead or take moves back. It is not a measure of how often a person wins.

How Yukon is dealt and played here

• Seven columns hold all 52 cards. The first column has a single card; the others hold 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.
• Face up and face down. In columns two to seven, the bottom five cards are face up and the rest are hidden. The single card in the first column is face up.
• No stock. Everything you'll ever play with is already on the table.
• Moving cards. Pick up any face-up card and everything on top of it, and place the group on a card one rank higher of the opposite color.
• Empty columns accept only a King, with whatever is on top of it.
• Foundations run by suit from Ace up to King.

Why Yukon punishes autopilot

Because you can move a card with a jumbled pile on top of it, there are usually many legal moves — and most of them just shuffle problems around. A player who takes the first reasonable move ends up moving the same groups back and forth while the hidden cards stay hidden.

Our bot averaged only 7.4 cards on the foundations per game. It wasn't unlucky; it was busy. The solver, which could see what was under each pile, found wins in two thirds of deals or more.

One thing that didn't matter: buried Aces. On average about 1.6 of the four Aces start face down. The bot won 4.4% of deals with two or more hidden and 4.5% of deals with one or none. Don't let the opening layout discourage you.

Ways to play Yukon better than autopilot

Every move should uncover something

The big-group move is powerful because it can reach deep into a column. Use it to expose face-down cards. A move that only rearranges face-up cards is usually a wasted move.

Target the tallest columns

The seventh column hides six cards under its five face-up ones. That's where the stuck cards are, so that's where your digging pays best.

Save your empty column for the right King

Only Kings can fill an empty column. Move the King whose group is holding the most hidden cards hostage, not just the first King you see.

Get low cards home when they're safe

Aces and 2s can go up right away. Beyond that, keep a card in play if it may still be needed to hold a lower card of the opposite color.

Plan with Undo

Yukon has more choices per turn than almost any other solitaire here. Try a line; if it doesn't turn over a card within a few moves, undo and try another.

What goes wrong most often

• Moving the same group back and forth between two columns.
• Emptying a column without a King worth putting there.
• Forgetting that the cards on top of the one you move don't need to be in order — you have more options than you think.
• Giving up early. Only 3.4% of deals were proven impossible.

Yukon on this site

Play it free in your browser — desktop, tablet or phone — with nothing to install and no sign-up or email. Cards are big and readable, and the zoom control helps with long Yukon columns. You get Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play, plus drag-and-drop or tap-to-move. Wins, time and moves are tracked for the current game, and you can mute the sound, go fullscreen or change table colors. No gambling, and nothing to buy.

Enjoying the no-stock style? Alaska Solitaire is Yukon's close relative with a same-suit twist. For a classic with a stock, go back to Klondike, or try Diplomat for two decks.

The research behind these numbers, step by step

The play-solitaire-free-online.us team at Solitairen OOD tested Yukon in September 2026, using the rules as coded on this site.

1. Rules from our game code. Columns of 1, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 cards; the last five of each face up; no stock; any face-up card moves with everything on it; it must land on a card one rank higher of the opposite color; only Kings fill empty columns.
2. Game rebuilt in code. We programmed Yukon, including the group move, so both a bot and a solver could play it.
3. Numbered deals. Seeds 1 to 10,000 for the bot; the solver used 500 of them. They're our own deal numbers.
4. Two players. The bot sees only face-up cards, looks up to 300 positions ahead each turn and never undoes — a floor, and a low one. The solver sees every card and searches for a win, stopping after 50,000 positions per deal — a ceiling no person can reach.
5. Running it. 10,000 bot games and 500 solver deals. Deals the solver hadn't finished were marked undecided (29.6%), not guessed.
6. Published comparison. Yukon isn't among the games in Blake & Gent (2026), so we have no published figure to check against. Our numbers stand on their own.
7. Margin of error. A "95% range" is where the true value almost certainly lies. For the solver's proven wins: 62.8% to 71.0%.
8. Limits. The bot is weak at Yukon, so 4.5% says little about skilled human play. The solver's result is a wide range because of the undecided deals, and 500 deals is a modest sample.

The code behind the test

Yukon is coded in yukon.py (which also handles Alaska), in Python 3.11 with the standard library only. The bot is a look-ahead that explores up to 300 positions per turn on the visible cards, scoring +60 for each foundation card, −20 for each hidden card, +1 for each correctly built link and −4 for each wrong one. The solver is a depth-first search capped at 50,000 positions per deal, which also makes safe automatic foundation moves. runner.py spread the work across 19 processes on a 20-core machine: about 2 minutes for the 10,000 bot games and about 8 minutes for the 500 solver deals. Percentages carry Wilson score intervals.

The code and this page were written with help from Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, which also reviewed the code. It didn't produce any results: every figure came from running the simulations, and we reviewed them before they went live.

By Admin, play-solitaire-free-online.us (Solitairen OOD). Research dated September 18, 2026.

Questions new players ask

Should a Klondike player expect Yukon to be tougher?

It feels different more than harder. There's no stock to fall back on, but you can move far more at once. With perfect knowledge, at least two in three deals can be won.

Do the cards I move on top need to be in order?

No. Only the card you pick up has to fit where it's going. Whatever sits on top of it comes along for the ride.

Why did your bot win so rarely?

It can't undo and only plans a short way ahead, which Yukon punishes. Think of 4.5% as the "no thinking" baseline, not a typical result.

How many Yukon deals are impossible?

Our solver proved 3.4% impossible. Another 29.6% weren't settled within its search limit.

What's the best game to play next?

Alaska keeps the Yukon deal but has you build in suit, in either direction.