Easthaven Solitaire: a game that is almost never truly lost

Easthaven looks like a small Klondike: seven short columns, a stock pile and four foundations. It plays differently, though. When you click the stock, it deals one card onto every column at once, and there is no going round again. Once the stock is gone, you win or lose with what is on the table.

It has a reputation for being tough. Our research says the deals themselves are remarkably generous. A solver that sees every card, including the face-down ones and the whole stock, found a complete solution for 97.6% of 3,000 deals on this site's rules. It proved none of them impossible. The other 2.4% were undecided when it hit its search limit.

That is a ceiling: no player can see hidden cards, so real results will be lower. But it tells you something important. When you lose a game of Easthaven here, the deal was almost certainly winnable.

Play it free in your browser, with nothing to install.

The ceiling at a glance

Why our number is not the published one

A major study of patience games, Blake & Gent (2026), reports that 82.844% of East Haven deals are winnable with perfect knowledge. That figure is for a stricter version of the game, where cards move only one at a time.

On this site you can move a whole run of cards in one go. That is a different game, so we do not put our number next to theirs as if they measured the same thing. We quote only the result for the rules you actually play here.

The rules as this site plays them

21 cards out, 31 in the stock

Seven columns of three cards each, with only the top card face up. The remaining 31 cards form the stock.

The one-card-per-column deal

• Each click on the stock deals one card face up onto every column, left to right.
• The last deal has only three cards, so only the first three columns get one.
• You may deal even if some columns are empty.
• There is no redeal. When the stock is gone, it is gone.

How columns are built

• Build down in alternating colors: a red 4 on a black 5.
• Any face-up run moves as a unit.
• Any card, not just a King, can go into an empty column.

How you win

All 52 cards on the four foundations, built up by suit from Ace to King.

What the ceiling suggests about good play

Clear the table before every deal

Every stock deal drops a card on top of each column, which can bury exactly the card you were about to free. Make every useful move first, then deal.

Turn over the hidden pairs first

Each column starts with two hidden cards, and on average about one Ace is among them. The sooner those are face up, the fewer surprises the stock deals can spring.

Use empty columns freely

Unlike Klondike, any card can fill a space here. An empty column is a flexible parking spot for a run you need to move out of the way.

Do not panic at a dead start

In 8.2% of deals there is no move at all among the first seven face-up cards. That is fine. Deal from the stock and the game opens up. The solver found no deal it could prove lost.

Undo stands in for seeing the hidden cards

The solver wins because it can see ahead. You cannot, but you can test a line and back out with Undo, which is unlimited here.

Timing the stock deals

The biggest decision in Easthaven is when to deal from the stock. There are 31 cards, which gives four deals of seven cards and a final deal of three. Each deal is a one-way trip: those cards land on top of your columns and there is no second pass.

• Before each deal, finish the table. Make every move that turns over a card, sends a card home or combines two runs. Anything left undone may be buried by the next deal.
• Leave the right columns open. Every column receives a card in the first four deals, even empty ones. An empty column will not stay empty, so use it just before you deal, not right after.
• Look at the tops after each deal. The seven new cards change what is playable. Scan them before moving anything else; there are often several easy moves.
• Save the last deal. That closing deal is just three cards, and only columns one to three get one. By then the game is usually close to decided, so play out the table fully first.

Because runs move together here, a card dealt onto a well-built column is rarely a disaster. You can usually lift the whole run somewhere else. That flexibility is a big reason the solver found so few losing deals on this site.

Inside the test, one step at a time

The solitaire-online.us team tested Easthaven in September 2026.

1. Reading the rules from our game code. Seven columns of three, a 31-card stock that deals one card to each column, no redeal, dealing allowed with empty columns, alternating-color building, runs that move together and any card into a space.
2. Rebuilding the game. We wrote Easthaven as a Python program with those rules.
3. Dealing the cards. 3,000 deals, each from a numbered seed so the test can be repeated exactly.
4. Choosing the player. A "thoughtful" solver that knows the face-down cards and the order of the stock. That makes its result a ceiling, not a prediction of how often people win.
5. Running it. Up to 100,000 positions per deal. Each deal ended solved, proven impossible or undecided.
6. Checking against published research. The published figure is for a stricter one-card-at-a-time rule, so it cannot be compared directly. We also tried that stricter rule ourselves, and our results did not line up with the published figure; we have not yet found why. That is another reason we quote only the site-rule result.
7. Working out the margin of error. A 95% range means the true value would fall inside it in 19 of 20 repeats. Deals solved: 97.0–98.1%.
8. What the numbers cannot tell you. How often a person wins. A player who cannot see the hidden cards or the stock will win less often than the solver.

The code behind the ceiling

The study is written in Python 3.11 using only the standard library. Easthaven has its own module, easthaven.py, and a shared runner spreads the deals across processor cores with Python's multiprocessing.

The solver is a depth-first search: it follows one line of play as far as it goes, then backs up and tries the next. It remembers positions it has already visited so it never searches one twice, and it moves cards to the foundations automatically only when that is safe. The 95% ranges use the Wilson score formula.

Anthropic's Claude, an AI assistant, helped with the solver code and with an early draft of this page. It did not produce any results. Every figure comes from running the solver.

By Admin, solitaire-online.us (Solitairen OOD). Study date: September 19, 2026.

Ceiling questions from players

Is every Easthaven game winnable?

We cannot say every one, but the solver proved none of 3,000 deals impossible and solved 97.6%, with every card visible.

Why do I lose so often if it is so winnable?

Because you cannot see the hidden cards or the stock order. The solver can. That gap is where most losses happen.

Once the stock is used up, can I recycle it?

No. Easthaven has no redeal on this site.

Do empty columns need a King here?

Yes. That is one of the big differences from Klondike, where only Kings can.

Which games play like Easthaven?

Try Klondike Solitaire for the classic layout, or Yukon Solitaire, which also lets you move groups of cards.