Golf solitaire rules
Golf is solitaire in three minutes. Every card is face up, there is only one kind of move, and a hand is over before your coffee cools. It is also much harder to clear than it looks: the trick is spotting long up-and-down chains before you start. Rules, scoring for a nine-hole round, odds and strategy below.
Golf in 30 seconds
- Deal seven columns of five cards, all face up. Turn one more card up to start the waste pile; the other 16 are the stock.
- Move the end card of any column onto the waste if it is one rank higher or lower, any suit. A 7 takes a 6 or an 8.
- Nothing goes on a King, and there is no wrapping between King and Ace.
- No move? Turn the next stock card onto the waste. When the stock is gone and nothing plays, the hand ends.
- Your score is the number of cards left on the table. Low score wins, like real golf.
How a hand goes
Shuffle one deck without jokers. Deal 35 cards face up into seven columns of five, overlapping so you can read them all. Turn one card from the rest face up: that is the first waste card. The remaining 16 cards are the face-down stock.
Only the uncovered card at the end of each column can play. Play it onto the waste if it is exactly one rank away from the waste card, up or down, ignoring suit. That card becomes the new waste card, so you can chain: on a 5, play a 6, then a 7, then a 6, then a 5. Aces are low: an Ace only takes a 2, and a 2 takes an Ace or a 3.
The King is the dead end. Once a King is on the waste, nothing can go on it, and you must turn a stock card. (A common house rule lets a Queen go on a King, and another, sometimes called "turning the corner", lets King and Ace connect. Neither is in the standard rules.)
When no column card fits, turn the top stock card onto the waste and look again. The hand ends when the stock is empty and nothing plays, or when you clear all 35 cards.
Scoring a round of nine holes
One deal is a "hole". Score one point for every card still on the table. If you clear the table, score minus one for every card still in the stock: clearing with 4 stock cards left is a score of -4. Play nine holes and add them up; lowest total wins, and two players can compete deal by deal with the same scoring. The Wikipedia article calls 45 or under (an average of 5 a hole) a par round.
How often can you clear the table?
The stock is face down, so you cannot see what is coming. If you could, about 45.1% of deals could be cleared, according to Blake and Gent's solver study (arXiv 1906.12314). Real players do far worse: Solitaire Bliss reports about 3% of games won on its site. That is why most people play Golf for a score rather than for a clear table.
Strategy
- Count chains before you play. Everything on the table is visible. When several cards could play, trace each option a few moves deep and take the one that runs longest.
- Bounce, do not just climb. A 6-7-6-5-6 chain uses five cards where 6-7-8 stops at three. Going back down to a rank you already played is often the way to keep going.
- Save a King for the end of a chain. Playing a King kills the run until the next stock card. If you hold one, use it as the last card of a chain, never the first.
- Dig out the deep cards. The top card of each column is the hardest to reach. Prefer plays that shorten tall columns, so the last few stock cards still have targets.
- Hold a link card when you can. If a 9 is the only way from the 8s to the 10s on the table, do not spend it on a short chain now. Wait for a stock card that lets it join two groups.
Play Golf online or at home
Play at home: one deck, a pencil and a scrap of paper for the nine holes. Golf takes very little table space, so it is a good game for a tray table or a train.