Yukon

The move that makes Yukon Yukon

In Klondike you carry a tidy descending sequence or nothing. In Yukon you pick up any face up card and everything below it comes too, in whatever order it happens to be, and only the card you picked up has to fit where it lands. For example, a red nine with four unrelated cards stacked under it drops onto any black ten, and all five move.

That turns every column into a crane. The card you want is never lost, only underneath something, and the question is always which pile you are willing to make worse to reach it. Building tidy sequences is a habit from Klondike, and here it is the wrong instinct.

The rest is familiar. Foundations at the top: ace to king, one suit each, and you win the game when all four are complete. The tableau piles run down in alternating red and black, red on black, and only a king moves into an empty column.

No stock, and what that costs you

The deal goes out in two passes. First a Klondike shape of twenty eight cards, one face up at the foot of each column. Then the remaining twenty four are dealt face up, four at a time, to every column but the first. The whole deck is on the table before you play a card.

So there is no stock to turn and no waste pile to fish in. Twenty one cards start face down, the same as a Klondike deal, but that game also hides twenty four more in a stock you must work through. Here you can see thirty one of the fifty two from the starting position, so a hand can be read further ahead than in any other game on this shelf.

Auto is wired to the same idea. Once no card is left face down, the rest of the hand is just moving cards to the top in order, so the game finishes it for you. Undo steps back through the last thirty moves, New deals again, and ctrl and z does the undo from a keyboard.

Is Yukon Solitaire always winnable

No, and anybody who tells you otherwise is filtering their deals. Ours is a straight shuffle of fifty two cards, so some hands cannot be won however well you play, and with no stock there is nothing to rescue a bad one. A dead board here is usually an ace buried near the foot of a column with no king free to unpack it.

What Yukon gives you instead is information, most of the pack showing from the first move, so more of the loss is yours to own. In our opinion it is the best of the six once Klondike stops surprising you.

Free, in a browser tab

There is surely an app somewhere. Here you just open a page and start playing: no download, no install, no account, no email. Tap a card and then tap where it goes, or tap the same card twice to send it to its foundation when it is ready. It plays fine on a phone.

It is free, and you might see an ad now and then, which we will try to keep discreet. Nothing is saved when the tab closes, since there is no account to save it to.

This is the classic Yukon, dealt the way the rules have it, and it sits beside Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid and TriPeaks on the solo shelf. The card games on the other one need a friend and a link.