Golf
Screen shot of the game Golf from Pretty Good Solitaire.
Golf is one of the classic and best known solitaire card games. It was originally called One Foundation, because the object is to play all of the cards to a single pile. At some point the name was changed to Golf. Probably this was because the game is hard to win, therefore various methods of scoring have been developed for the game, where beating a certain score means you made par for that hand.
To start a game of Golf, the single deck of cards is dealt out into 7 piles of 5 cards each, with each card face up. The remaining cards are turned face down and form the stock. One card is then turned over from the stock to start the only foundation pile. All play will be on this pile. There is no moving of cards about the 7 other piles.
The top card of each of the 7 piles is available for play. Build on the single foundation pile in sequence either up or down, regardless of suit. Kings and Aces are not consecutive. The only card that can be played on an Ace is a Two. Kings stop building altogether, you cannot even play a Queen on a King.
When no more plays are possible, you can turn over the top card of the stock to the single foundation. This card can then be built upon as before. The objective is to move all the cards from the 7 piles onto the single foundation before you run out of cards in the stock. If the stock runs out but cards remain in the 7 piles, then unless you can play those cards to the foundation then the game is lost.
Golf is a difficult game to win. An average player can win the game only 2% of the time, and even good players win less than 10% of the time. Because it is so difficult, an easier variation was developed where the Kings and Aces are consecutive and you can play Kings on Aces and vica versa. This variation, called Putt Putt in Pretty Good Solitaire, increases the chances of winning for average player to about 25%.
Golf is one of the 725 games in Pretty Good Solitaire, one of the 101 games in Goodsol Solitaire 101, and one of the 30 in Most Popular Solitaire.
