The single-player card classic, turn the stock, weave the tableau, and send every suit home from Ace to King.
Clear the whole deal onto the four foundation piles, each built up in one suit from Ace to King. Move cards around seven tableau columns to free what you need.
The game is older than its name. The earliest rules for what is now called Klondike appear in the 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games, under the heading "Seven-Card Klondike", and single-deck patience had been played in Europe long before that.
Where the name came from is genuinely unsettled. The usual story ties it to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99 — prospectors filling long Yukon winters with a deck of cards. It is a good story, but the record does not support it: the origin of the name is unknown, and no material evidence substantiates the gold-rush explanation. Treat it as folklore that stuck rather than settled fact.
What made Klondike the most played card game in the world was not the Yukon but Windows 3.0. Microsoft Solitaire was written in the summer of 1988 by an intern, Wes Cherry, and shipped with Windows in 1990, its cards drawn by Susan Kare. It was there to soothe users intimidated by the new interface: at a time when many people had never used a mouse, dragging a card from one pile to another taught drag-and-drop more gently than any tutorial could.
Klondike is the timeless single-player patience card game, rebuilt as a fast, original, free browser version with seeded deals and clean drag-and-drop play.