Solitaire — Turn 1

It describes how many cards come off the stock per click. Turn 1 gives you one, so the card you turn is the card you may play. Turn 3 gives you three at once and only lets you play the top one, which means two cards in every three are locked away until you shift the phase by playing something off the waste. In turn 1 there is no phase and nothing is locked: cycle the stock and you will see, and be able to use, all twenty-four cards.

Clearly, and by a lot. Every stock card being reachable removes the single largest source of dead ends in Klondike. The precise gap is hard to state honestly: the well-known figure of 81.956% ± 0.096% winnable deals is for thoughtful Klondike at draw three with every face-down card known in advance (Blake & Gent, 2019, over a million deals), and no study of comparable precision exists for draw one. It is higher. Nobody has published how much higher.

What is worth saying plainly is that playing blind — as you are, as a human, with the face-down cards genuinely face down — is very much worse than 82% at either draw count. That number is an upper bound on a perfect player with perfect information, not a description of your Tuesday evening.

• Turn a face-down card over before anything else. Twenty-one of the twenty-eight tableau cards start hidden and they are the only real unknown in the game.
• Do not send cards to the foundations just because you can. A red 6 on the foundation is a red 6 that cannot take a black 5 out of a stuck column.
• Empty a column only when a King is available to fill it. An empty column with no King is a hole you cannot use.
• Cycle the whole stock before committing to anything. In turn 1 that costs you nothing but clicks, and it tells you exactly what is coming.

Turn 1 if you want to finish games; turn 3 if you want to think. Turn 3 is the original Windows default and it is a materially different puzzle — the order of the cards inside the stock matters enormously, because a redeal reproduces exactly the same triples. If you have only ever played turn 1, the first thing you will notice about turn 3 is that the stock stops being a resource and starts being a constraint.