The addictive card-clearing solitaire
Strip all 35 face-up tableau cards to the foundation, suit-blind, before your sixteen stock draws run out. Cards you strand count as strokes against you — string nine deals into a course and try to finish under par.
Golf Solitaire flips the usual solitaire goal on its head: instead of building anything, you strip the table bare, and your result is counted like strokes on a golf course — the fewer cards left behind, the better the hole. Seven columns of five cards are dealt completely face-up, so you see the entire deal from the first click and every loss traces back to a decision you can actually find.
The numbers behind the deal drive everything. Thirty-five cards land on the tableau, one flips over to start the foundation, and the last sixteen sit face-down in the stock. To clear the hole you must remove all 35 tableau cards using just 17 foundation starters — the opening flip plus your sixteen draws — which works out to slightly more than two cards per run on average. Fall behind that pace early and the back nine of the deal gets very tight.
A legal play is any column's top card exactly one rank above or below the foundation card; suits are ignored entirely. On a 7 you may play any 6 or any 8, then keep going from whatever you just played. On Easy the rank ladder wraps, so an Ace sits next to both a 2 and a King. Medium and Hard have no wrap: Aces stop downward runs, Kings stop upward ones, and a King parked on top of a column will cost you a draw to dislodge.
Runs — several plays chained off a single foundation card — are what decide holes. The prettiest pattern is the bounce: ride a sequence up to its crest, say 8-9-10, then catch a 9 and ride it back down the other side. Each bounce can double the length of a run, and long runs are the only way to beat the two-cards-per-draw pace the arithmetic demands.
Scoring works exactly like the sport that named the game. Cards stranded on the tableau when the stock runs dry are your strokes for the hole; a cleared board is the ace you brag about. Regulars play courses — nine consecutive deals with a running stroke total — and judge themselves against a personal par rather than any single hand, because a share of deals simply cannot be cleared no matter how well you play.
Expect to clear roughly 10-15% of deals without wrapping and 20-30% with it, and treat Hard mode as a different course entirely: the same 35 cards dealt as five columns of seven, burying more cards beneath every top card. However you set it, a round takes about two minutes, costs nothing, and keeps your stats in your own browser.
The deal
7 × 5
Thirty-five cards dealt face-up in seven columns of five — Hard rearranges the identical 35 into five columns of seven.
Draw budget
16 + 1
Sixteen stock draws plus the opening foundation flip must carry all 35 tableau cards — just over two clears per foundation card.
Clear rate
10–30%
Roughly 10-15% of deals clear without wrapping; Easy-mode King-Ace wrapping lifts that toward 20-30%.
Golf borrows real scorecard logic, and the metaphor holds up surprisingly well over a session. Our Par & Course Scoring guide covers the full system, but the essentials fit on a tee marker:
Each setting changes a real rule, not a cosmetic label, so your stroke averages will differ measurably between them.
Sixteen draws against thirty-five cards leaves no room for one-and-done plays. Watch the direction of your sequence, hunt for bounces at the crest and trough, and favor plays that keep two continuation ranks alive rather than one. A single seven-card run erases a fifth of the tableau without spending a draw.
Golf is also the name of a popular multiplayer card game where each player is dealt a small grid of cards — usually 4, 6, or 9 — and draws and swaps to finish with the lowest total. That draw-and-swap Golf is a different game from the solitaire on this page — the full multiplayer rules live on our card game hub, linked below.
Playing the multiplayer version with friends instead? Golf card game rules (4, 6 and 9 cards) on Card Game Rules covers the draw-and-swap game.
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