Golf rules

Setup & the deal

Thirty-five cards are dealt face up into seven columns of five — the whole course is visible from the first moment. The remaining 17 cards form the stock, face down, and the waste pile starts empty. There are no foundations, no free cells and no hidden cards.

Suits and colors are irrelevant throughout; Golf is played on ranks alone. The deal is recorded when the game starts, so the Restart button replays the identical 35-card layout and stock order.

How to play

Only the top (fully visible) card of each column is in play. You may move it to the waste when it is one rank above or below the current waste card. In this version the sequence turns the corner: Ace and King are adjacent, so an Ace plays on a King and a King on an Ace.

• The free first move — the waste starts empty, so the opening play is any column’s top card, or a stock flip if you prefer. This is the only unchecked play of the game.
• Chains — after a play, the new waste card immediately sets the next target: a 6 takes a 7, that 7 takes an 8, the 8 can take a 7 again. Direction can reverse on every card.
• The stock — when nothing plays, click the stock to flip its next card onto the waste. There are exactly 17 flips and no recycling; the waste is never turned back over.
• No column-to-column moves — cards never move between columns, and nothing is ever played back onto a column. An emptied column stays empty; it has no special use.

A sample sequence: the waste shows a 9. You play a 10 from column two, an exposed Jack from column five, a Queen, a King — and then, turning the corner, an Ace from column one and a 2 beneath your original 10. Six cards gone on a single waste card. Chains like that, spotted before you commit to the first play, are the entire skill of Golf; the rules never force you to take the first legal card you see.

Winning & losing

You win the moment the last column card is played — the 35th card hitting the waste ends the game at once, and any cards still in the stock are ignored.

You lose when no column top is adjacent to the waste card and the stock is empty. With only 17 flips and no recycling, every stock card you burn without first milking the board is a real cost: 35 board cards must ride on chains started by at most 18 waste cards (the free opener plus 17 flips).

That arithmetic is worth internalizing: 35 cards, at most 18 chain starters, so your chains must average roughly two cards each just to break even — and every flip that plays zero cards raises the bar on the rest. Turn-the-corner rules make Golf noticeably friendlier than the strict version, since Kings and Aces are connectors rather than walls, but it is far from a gimme: long chains, not lucky flips, win games.

There is also no in-between result. Unlike tabletop Golf, which counts leftover cards as strokes, this version is binary — the board is either cleared or it is not, and your statistics track wins, games played and your best clear.

Edge cases & fine print

• Wraparound is symmetric. K-A-K-A is legal; the corner can be turned any number of times in either direction.
• Ranks only. A play is legal purely on rank distance — suit, color and column position never matter.
• Only column tops exist. Cards lower in a column are visible but untouchable until everything above them is played.
• The waste is one-way. Cards on the waste are out of the game as landing material — only its top card matters, and nothing returns from it.
• Winning is checked before the stock. Clearing all columns wins immediately even with a full stock remaining; drawing when the board could still be played is never forced, only foolish.
• Drawing is always legal while stock remains, even when a column top could be played. The rules permit it; the arithmetic punishes it — a skipped play is a chain starter spent for nothing.
• The free first move can be a draw. Opening with a stock flip instead of a column card is legal, and occasionally right when no column top starts a chain worth having.
• The hint favours tall columns — when several plays are legal it points at the column with the most cards left, the one with the most to unlock. It suggests drawing only when no column top plays.
• Undo, auto-save and Restart work as in all our solitaires: undo steps back one move, the game resumes after a closed tab, and Restart replays this exact deal rather than shuffling.

Variants

We play cardgames.io Golf: seven columns of five, an empty starting waste with a free first move, turn-the-corner Ace-King adjacency, and 17 stock flips with no recycling. Traditional variants change the geometry or the corner rule:

• Strict (no-wrap) Golf — Aces play only on 2s and nothing plays on a King, making Kings dead cards that must be drawn past. Substantially harder.
• Nine-hole scoring — the classic tabletop framing: play nine deals, count each card left in the columns as one stroke, lowest total wins the round. A cleared board in some versions scores negative strokes for leftover stock cards.
• Eight-column or double-deck Golf — bigger courses with the same movement rules.
• Joker Golf — a wild joker that plays on anything and takes anything; not part of the classic 52-card game.

The same one-up-one-down engine also powers TriPeaks, which trades Golf’s fully open board for three interlocking peaks with hidden cards — worth trying when you want the mechanic with a memory element added.

Frequently asked questions

Related rulebooks

• TriPeaks rules — chain up-or-down streaks over three peaks
• Pyramid rules — pair cards to 13 and clear the pyramid
• Solitaire rules — the classic klondike patience game
• Clock rules — beat the fourth king — 1-in-13 fate