Russian Solitaire

How to Play the Yukon variation

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Click on the screen shot of the game Russian Solitaire from Pretty Good Solitaire to download the 30 day free trial version.

Dear Solitaire Player,

Russian Solitaire is a challenging and popular one deck solitaire game that is a close variation of the game Yukon.

My version of Russian Solitaire in Pretty Good Solitaire allows you to play offline, full screen, with complete undo and my unique right click quick move. It's the best way to play solitaire!

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How to Play Russian Solitaire

The cards are dealt out exactly as in the game Yukon. The deal begins by dealing cards out to 7 tableau piles as in Klondike (1 card to the first pile, 2 cards to the 2nd pile, and so on to the 7 piles) with the top card face up. Then the remaining cards are dealt out to the 2nd to 7th piles, all face up.

Like Yukon, in Russian Solitaire you can move groups of cards in the tableau regardless of any sequence. This means that any face up card, no matter how deeply buried, can be moved by picking it and all the cards on top of it up together. The tableau is built down by suit, rather than by alternate color as in Yukon, which makes the game considerably harder than Yukon. The objective is to move all the cards up to the foundations.

It is very important to uncover the face down cards, because only the face up cards are in play. Once a card becomes face up, it can be accessed, so getting the cards face up is the key.

Russian Solitaire is extremely challenging and you will find yourself getting blocked (not able to make any moves) at some point in most games. The average player wins only about 5% of the time. Good players can win 10-20% of the time.

Because it is common to get blocked very quickly, it doesn't take long to play (and lose) a lot of Russian Solitaire games. Since you can play so many games so quickly, Russian Solitaire is the fourth most played game on the Most Played Games list in Pretty Good Solitaire. There are several Russian Solitaire players who have played the game tens of thousands of times. Russian Solitaire is addictive in that you will want to keep playing until you win a game.

The origin of Russian Solitaire is not known. It is likely that it was created about the same time as its sister game Yukon, sometime in the first half of the twentieth century.