Free Games How to play Golf Solitaire
Golf deals 35 cards into seven columns of five, every card face up so you can see the whole course from the start. One more card opens the pile, and the last 16 wait in the stock.
There is only one move to learn: tap the bottom card of any column when it is one higher or one lower than the pile card. It hops onto the pile and becomes the new number to match. Suits and colours never matter. Clearing a card frees the one above it, and that is how you work up a column. When nothing on the board connects, tap the stock for a fresh pile card. Clear all 35 and the course is finished.
One higher, one lower — and Aces wrap around
If the pile shows a 7, you may play a 6 or an 8. The ranks join in a circle here, so an Ace connects to both a King and a Two. On a King you can play a Queen or an Ace; on an Ace, a King or a Two. Long runs like Nine → Ten → Jack → Queen are where the game opens up.
Strict Golf forbids that wrap, which strands a great many deals with no possible finish. We allow it on purpose: the point here is a game you can actually complete, not a coin toss.
Every deal can be won
Before a game reaches you, the computer plays it through to check that a winning path exists, and quietly deals again if one does not. That means two things. Every game on your screen is finishable — and when you press Hint, the move it shows is always one that keeps the win alive, not just any legal move.
Gentle tips
- Play the long columns first. A tall column left to the end is what strands a deal — dig into the deepest one while you still have stock cards in hand.
- Look for a run before you deal. Each stock card is precious, so chase every chain on the board first. The Hint button will happily point one out.
- Remember the wrap. Aces are the most useful cards in the game because they join Kings to Twos.
- Undo is unlimited. Rewind as far as you like and try another path — experimenting is part of the fun.
Calm by design
No timer, no score pressure, and running out of cards is never a “game over” — a friendly Start fresh button simply deals a new game. If you enjoy Golf, you may also like our TriPeaks Solitaire, which shares the same one-tap rule, or the classic Solitaire and Pyramid Solitaire. You can also browse all of our card games and every free game on the site.
Where Golf Solitaire came from
Golf is one of many single-player card games built around clearing cards from a layout in sequence rather than sorting them into suits, and like most of that family its early history was not written down. It appears to have taken shape sometime in the twentieth century, passed along by word of mouth and by card-game columns that once ran in newspapers, rather than by any one inventor whose name got attached to it.
The name comes from the scoring, borrowed from the sport: the aim is to finish with as low a score as possible, which here means clearing as many cards as you can rather than racking a count up. Give it a try among our card games.
