Alaska Solitaire

How to Play Alaska

Alaska belongs to the Yukon family: there is no stock, every card is dealt at the start, and you can pick up any face-up card along with everything on top of it.

What sets it apart is direction. Russian Solitaire builds down in suit, while Alaska lets you build up or down in suit, so a 9 of diamonds can go on either the 8 or the 10 of diamonds. That gives you far more moves to choose from, and more ways to tangle a column.

Setup

All 52 cards are dealt into seven columns. The first column holds one face-up card. The other six hold from one to six face-down cards, each with five face-up cards on top. Four empty foundations wait above.

Rules

• Foundations build up in suit from Ace to King.
• Columns build up or down by one rank, in the same suit.
• Any face-up card can move with every card on top of it, even if those cards are out of order. Only the card you pick up has to fit where it lands.
• Only a King, or a group starting with a King, can move to an empty column.
• A face-down card turns over as soon as it is uncovered.
• There is no stock. Every card is in play from the start.

How to win

Move all 52 cards to the foundations. Once every card is face up and the rest can go up in order, the autocomplete button finishes the game for you.

How often can Alaska be won?

We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 86 of 200 (43%), showed that 8 could not be won, and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 106.

Those undecided deals may still be winnable, so treat the win count as a minimum. The solver can see every card, including face-down ones, so it measures what the cards allow, not how often a person will win.

Alaska Strategy

• Start with the columns holding the most face-down cards. Those 21 hidden cards are what can stop you, and you can't plan around them until they are turned over.
• Having two directions means a card often has two possible homes. Before moving, check which one uncovers something new and which one will still be useful later.
• Avoid building up and down on the same card in the same stretch of a column. Runs that change direction are harder to send to the foundations later.
• Get Aces and 2s up early, since a low card buried in a long column can hold up its whole suit.
• Clear a column only when you have a King ready to move there, because nothing else can use the space.

More Solitaire Games

Love Alaska? Try these other solitaire variants on Solitaire Scramble:

Alaska FAQ