Card games, playable in your browser

Four card games shipped with Windows over the years and between them they are probably the most-played software Microsoft ever wrote. All four are here, rebuilt from the rules as original implementations, because the originals are not redistributable and never have been.

What that buys you is worth stating: no emulator, no loading, no plugin. They are ordinary web pages and they behave like it — instant on a laptop, properly responsive on a phone, and they pick up mid-hand exactly where you stopped.

Where to start

Solitaire (Klondike) — Klondike, with both draw-one and draw-three. The default most people mean when they say 'solitaire'.
FreeCell — The thinking player's one: almost every deal is winnable, so losing is information rather than luck.
Spider Solitaire — Start at one suit. Four-suit Spider is a genuinely hard game and is not a good introduction to itself.
Hearts — The only one here with opponents. Three bots, full passing rotation, and shooting the moon actually works.

The rules are the whole point

A card game is nothing but its rules, so the rules are where the effort went. FreeCell implements the real supermove — how many cards you can shift at once is derived from free cells and empty columns, not a fixed number. Spider offers one, two and four suits, and will only lift a run that is genuinely in sequence and in suit. Hearts plays the full game including passing and shooting the moon, which most browser versions quietly omit because it complicates the scoring.

Hearts was also the one that needed the most testing. Bot turns run on timers, and a fast human click could leave a stale timer that fired after its seat had already played — so it now runs a single tracked timer that re-checks whose turn it actually is before acting. It was soak-tested over seven complete hands, every one scoring exactly 26 points, which is the arithmetic guarantee that nothing was dropped or double-counted.

Nothing is uploaded, nothing is tracked to a profile

There is no account and no server-side game state. The hand in progress lives in your own browser's storage, which is why it survives closing the tab and why it does not follow you to another device. You can inspect or clear all of it from the saves page.

Other categories: Classic shooters · Side-scrolling platformers · The Windows desktop classics · Card games · every game and guide

Frequently asked questions

Are these the Microsoft card games?

No, and they cannot be — Microsoft has never licensed those for redistribution. These are original implementations of the same public rules, written for this site. The rules of Klondike are not anyone's property; the 1990 executable is.

Do I need to sign up or download anything?

No. There is no account, nothing to install, and no download. Open a page and deal.

Will my game still be there tomorrow?

Yes, on the same browser and device. The hand in progress is saved automatically to local browser storage and restored when you return.

Do they work offline?

Once a page has loaded, play continues without a connection, but there is no service worker, so the first load of each game does need the network.