If you count how many deals can be won at all, Pyramid is the hardest of the five classic solitaire games. With every card known and three passes through the stock, 66% of Pyramid deals can be cleared. Klondike Turn 3 comes next at 82%, then Klondike Turn 1 at 90%. TriPeaks and Spider sit near 97%, and nearly every FreeCell deal can be won. How hard a game feels also depends on how many cards you can't see.
How the games were compared
A deal is winnable if some sequence of legal moves wins it. Checking that takes a solver that knows where every card is, including the face-down ones and the order of the stock. Researchers call this the "thoughtful" version of a game. It gives a ceiling: a deal that can't be won with all cards known can't be won blind either.
For Klondike, FreeCell and Spider we use the largest published study, by Charlie Blake and Ian Gent (The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire and Many Other Patience Games, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2026). Their solver covers dozens of games. It does not cover Pyramid or TriPeaks, and we found no large study of either under the rules this site uses. So we ran our own solver on deals 1 to 10,000 of each game, with every card known and with the same rules as our Pyramid and TriPeaks pages. The search ran each deal to the end, so a deal was either won or shown to be lost. Every win was then replayed move by move through the game's own rules before it counted.
| Game | Cards you can't see at the start | Deals winnable with every card known | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreeCell | none | 99.9989% | Blake & Gent, 10,000,000 deals |
| Spider | 44 face down, 50 in the stock | at least 97.3% | Blake & Gent: 9,731 of 10,000 won, none proven lost |
| TriPeaks | 18 face down, 23 in the stock | 97.2% | this site: 9,723 of deals 1 to 10,000 |
| Klondike Turn 1 | 21 face down, 24 in the stock | 90.5% | Blake & Gent, 1,000,000 deals |
| Klondike Turn 3 | 21 face down, 24 in the stock | 81.9% | Blake & Gent, 1,000,000 deals |
| Pyramid, three passes | 24 in the stock | 66.1% | this site: 6,611 of deals 1 to 10,000 |
Pyramid: the stock passes decide it
In Pyramid you remove pairs of uncovered cards that add up to 13, and Kings on their own. The cards in the pyramid are all face up. The hard part is that a card can only be paired with a partner that is uncovered at the same time, and the four partners of any card may all be buried in the wrong places.
How many times you may go through the stock changes the game more than anything else. On our deals, with every card known, one pass wins only 3.7% of games, two passes 48.5% and three passes 66.1%. (The one- and two-pass runs used deals 1 to 3,000.) The one-pass figure agrees with Solitaire Laboratory's study of a million Pyramid deals, which found 3.4% for the same rules. This site allows three passes, and under that rule about one deal in three is lost before you make a move. Pyramid deal 1 can be won; deal 4 can't.
TriPeaks: almost always winnable, often lost
TriPeaks looks like a game of luck, yet with every card known 97.2% of our deals can be cleared. On this site King and Ace connect, which helps. That is in line with the game's inventor, Robert Hogue, who reported that over 90% of the original game's deals can be solved (Tri Peaks on Wikipedia). But 18 of the 28 peak cards start face down and you go through the stock only once. Most lost TriPeaks games could have been won, if you had known which run to take.
Spider and Klondike: winnable on paper, hard in practice
Spider is the clearest case of a game that can almost always be won and still feels hard. Blake and Gent's solver won 9,731 of 10,000 Spider deals with all cards known and could not prove a single one unwinnable. Playing it normally, you see 10 of the 104 cards at the start. The other 44 tableau cards and the 50-card stock are guesses, and with four suits the runs you can move as a block are short.
Klondike hides fewer cards, 21 face down plus a 24-card stock, and in Turn 3 only every third stock card is in reach. We go into the Klondike numbers and our own solver lists in Is every Klondike solitaire game winnable?
FreeCell: the fair one
FreeCell deals all 52 cards face up, so there is nothing to guess. Blake and Gent put winnability at 99.9989% over ten million deals. Among the 32,000 deals of the original Microsoft FreeCell, only deal 11982 can't be won. If you lose a FreeCell game, the deal was almost certainly winnable and the moves were yours. That makes it the most skill-based of the five.
So which is hardest?
It depends on what you mean by hard. If you mean deals that are lost before the first move, Pyramid is the hardest, and Klondike Turn 3 is second. Spider makes you guess the most, because it hides more cards than any other game here. FreeCell asks the most of your play, since nearly every loss is a mistake you could have avoided. TriPeaks is the easiest to finish, as long as the stock is kind.
FAQ
What is the hardest solitaire game to win?
Among the common games, Pyramid: with three passes through the stock, a third of deals cannot be won even with every card known. With one pass, under 4% can.
Which solitaire game is easiest to win?
FreeCell has the most winnable deals, 99.9989%, but you have to find the solution yourself. TriPeaks comes next at 97.2%; with one pass through the stock, luck plays a bigger part there.
Is FreeCell harder than Klondike?
Fewer FreeCell deals are impossible, so if you play well you win more often. Klondike hides 45 cards, so even perfect play loses games that a solver with full information would win.
Can every game of Spider be won?
Nearly every one, with all cards known: no Spider deal has been proven unwinnable in Blake and Gent's sample. In a normal game the hidden cards make many of them hard to win.