Most people meet solitaire through Klondike and quietly assume that is what the word means. Seven columns, three cards at a time, hope the deal is kind. It is a fine game and a slightly misleading one, because Klondike sits at the luckiest end of a family that stretches a very long way in the other direction.
The most interesting members of that family are the ones that relax the rule everybody takes for granted: that you can only move a card, or a neatly ordered run. Yukon and Scorpion throw that rule out. The result is two games that look like Klondike, play nothing like it, and expose how much of your solitaire instinct is actually just habit.
The rule everyone assumes is fundamental
In Klondike, a card in a column is available only if it is at the bottom of the pile, or part of a properly ordered descending, alternating-colour sequence sitting on top. Anything underneath a mess is stuck until you dismantle the mess.
That constraint is what makes Klondike feel like housekeeping. You spend most of the game tidying so that a card you already know about becomes reachable.
Now remove it.
Yukon: move anything, take everything with you
In Yukon, you may pick up any face-up card, regardless of what is piled on top of it, and move it to a legal spot - and everything sitting above it comes along for the ride, in whatever order it happens to be in.
Two things follow immediately. First, almost nothing is ever truly stuck. Second, every move is now a decision about a whole stack rather than a card, because you are relocating a chunk of chaos from one column to another.
Yukon also deals almost everything face up - only a handful of cards start hidden - which pushes it a long way toward being a pure puzzle. You can see the problem. The difficulty is not discovery, it is sequencing: what order do you unbury things in, and which column do you accept as the dumping ground?
That is a very particular kind of thinking, and it is the same thinking that makes play FreeCell online such a useful companion game. FreeCell shows you every card from the first move and makes the entire difficulty a question of move order. Yukon does the same thing with a messier mechanism. If you enjoy one you will almost certainly take to the other.
Scorpion: the same freedom, a harsher board
Scorpion uses the same move-anything rule but tightens everything around it. Sequences must be built down in the same suit, not alternating colours, which removes roughly half the moves your Klondike reflexes will suggest. There is no waste pile and no redeal - just three cards held in reserve that you deal onto the tableau once, at a moment of your choosing.
The suit restriction is what makes Scorpion bite. In Klondike a red six will happily take a black five. In Scorpion it will not, and the board fills with near-misses that look like progress and are not.
The three reserve cards are the other half. Dealing them early can unlock a column; dealing them late can bury one. There is no right answer and no way to take it back, which makes it one of the better single decisions in any patience game.
Why these two are better practice than Klondike
Here is the argument for playing them even if you have no intention of switching allegiance.
Klondike hides cards, so a meaningful share of deals cannot be won however well you play - the hidden information is genuinely hidden, and no amount of skill recovers a deal that was dead when it was dealt. That is real luck, and it means a loss tells you very little.
Yukon and Scorpion mostly do not do that. Because almost everything is visible and almost nothing is locked, a loss is usually traceable to a specific decision - the column you flooded, the reserve you dealt too early. The feedback is honest.
Games with that property are unusually good at improving you, which is why the habit transfers across game families. It is the same reason a play Tetris online session teaches faster than it has any right to: the board state is fully visible, so every failure is legible. And it is why the tile version of the same idea works too - play Mahjong online and the entire board is in front of you, with the only randomness happening once, before you start.
Where the rest of the family sits
Once you see "how much is hidden?" as the axis, the whole cabinet organises itself:
| Game | Hidden information | What decides the result |
|---|---|---|
| Klondike | High - face-down columns and stock order | The deal, then play |
| Spider | High - five face-down rows | Column management |
| Yukon | Very low | Move order |
| Scorpion | Low | Suit discipline and one reserve decision |
| FreeCell | None after the deal | Pure solving |
The two-deck games - Forty Thieves and its relatives - sit slightly outside this, because doubling the deck changes the arithmetic more than it changes the information. That is a separate discussion, and it is the subject of its own piece.
How to actually play them
A short list that will save you the first few losses:
- In Yukon, uncover the face-down cards first. They are the only unknowns in the game; everything else can wait.
- Pick a dump column early and be deliberate about it, rather than spreading mess evenly across seven.
- In Scorpion, do not build a sequence you cannot later move. Same-suit runs are the only portable object in the game.
- Hold the three reserve cards until a column is genuinely blocked, unless dealing them creates an immediate unbury.
- Count before you commit. Both games let you move almost anything, which means almost every position has more options than you can hold in your head.
That last habit - deliberately counting the consequences before touching anything - is the one that carries furthest. It is exactly what a counting card game drills: Anyone who plays Hearts knows this: every card that has gone is public and permanent, and the good players are simply the ones keeping the running total. Same muscle, different table.
Next time you play
If you have only ever played Klondike, play a few hands of Yukon first - it is the friendlier introduction to the move-anything rule - and take on Scorpion once the freedom stops feeling like chaos. The rules hub has the exact move legality for both, the glossary covers the terms, and the daily deal gives every player the identical shuffle if you want to compare results honestly.