🃏 Classic1990MicrosoftFIDDLYKlondike Solitaire rebuild deck
FIDDLY
The rules engine is never where a card game goes wrong — the drag is, and a card that snaps home instead of springing back reads as a bug rather than a refusal.
You will get it, but one specific system will fight you.
Deceptively bigger than Minesweeper because the drag-and-drop is where all the effort goes. Agents write the rules engine perfectly and then produce a drag interaction that feels like dragging a spreadsheet cell. Budget most of your iteration on that, and steal the timing from the original: cards should feel light and slightly over-eager.
- Difficulty
- FIDDLY · 2 of 5
- First playable
- An evening
- The original
- 1 team-years
- Released
- 1990 · Classic
- Genre
- Cards
Build Klondike Solitaire as a single-page web app with drag-and-drop. Vanilla JS, Canvas or DOM, your call — but the drag must feel good.
Requirements:
- Standard Klondike: seven tableau piles, four foundations, stock and waste. Support both draw-1 and draw-3 modes, switchable in a menu.
- Card model separate from rendering: a Card is {rank, suit, faceUp}, a Pile is an array plus a rule for what may land on it. All legality checks live on the Pile, not in the drag handler.
- Drag a card and every valid card below it comes with it. Illegal drops animate back to origin with a spring, never snap instantly.
- Double-click sends a card to its foundation if legal. A single "auto-finish" button when no face-down cards remain.
- Unlimited undo via a move stack, and a redo. Restart deals the same seed; New Game deals a fresh one. Put the seed in the URL so a deal can be shared.
- Win detection triggers the bouncing-cards cascade: each foundation card falls with gravity and bounces off the bottom edge, leaving trails.
- Vector-drawn cards using SVG or Canvas paths, no image assets. Suits in red/black, crisp at any size.
Definition of done: I can win a draw-3 game with undo, and the cascade makes me want to win again.- The cascading victory animation, which is genuinely hard to make feel as good as the original
- Card art you have permission to ship, unless you draw or generate your own
- Nothing else at all
Dragged objects that lift, lag and spring back
The rules engine is never where a card game goes wrong; the drag is. A picked-up object should lift off the surface, trail the pointer by a hair and lean into its own direction of travel, and a refused drop should travel home slowly enough to watch, because an instant snap looks like a bug rather than a decision.
ScopeAn evening— build just this, not the game
Build a drag-feel toy as a single self-contained HTML file, DOM or Canvas 2D, pointer events, no build step. A dozen rectangular tokens in stacks, plus three drop targets: one accepts anything, one accepts only tokens of a matching colour, one accepts nothing at all. On pick-up the token scales to 1.04, gains a soft offset shadow and detaches to a top layer. While dragging, its rendered position lags the pointer by a frame of smoothing, and it tilts up to 6 degrees in proportion to horizontal pointer velocity, decaying back to level whenever the pointer stops. Grabbing a token part-way down a stack brings everything below it along, each one lagging slightly more than the one above. A legal drop settles with a small overshoot. An illegal drop springs back to its origin over roughly 220ms with visible easing, never an instant snap. Sliders for lag, tilt, overshoot and return duration. Definition of done: I can tell a refusal from a bug without reading a word of text.
Not a clone — Klondike Solitaire re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.
Ragnarok No Reflexes
Klondike Solitaire, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in Norse myth. Rendered in clean product UI 3D.
Build a browser game called "Ragnarok No Reflexes". The pitch in one line: a cards in the spirit of Klondike Solitaire, but a puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes, set in Norse myth. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Klondike Solitaire — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else A puzzle version — same fiction, no reflexes. Keep the world and the tension, remove execution difficulty entirely. Every encounter has a correct answer discoverable by thought. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME Norse myth. Cold, doomed and knowingly so. Everything is on its way to an ending everybody has already been told about. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK Clean product UI 3D. Soft studio lighting, muted brand palette, UI chrome that looks shippable, and zero grit — intentional polish. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 1 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Klondike Solitaire to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Klondike Solitaire is FIDDLY (2 of 5). You will get it, but one specific system will fight you. The rules engine is never where a card game goes wrong — the drag is, and a card that snaps home instead of springing back reads as a bug rather than a refusal. Reckon on an evening to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 1 team-years Microsoft spent.
What makes Klondike Solitaire hard to rebuild?
The rules engine is never where a card game goes wrong — the drag is, and a card that snaps home instead of springing back reads as a bug rather than a refusal. That is why it sits at FIDDLY rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is dragged objects that lift, lag and spring back — an evening of work.
How long does it take to build a Klondike Solitaire clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Klondike Solitaire — the original took Microsoft on the order of 1 team-years, released in 1990 on Classic. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about an evening, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Klondike Solitaire?
The cascading victory animation, which is genuinely hard to make feel as good as the original. Card art you have permission to ship, unless you draw or generate your own. Nothing else at all. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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