TrySolitaire August 2026: What 147,673 Games Tell Us

TrySolitaire Monthly: What 147,673 Games in August 2026 Tell Us

Published: September 2026 Data period: August 1–31, 2026 Sample: 147,673 games started, across more than 70 game variants Previous report: June 2026 →

We did not publish a standalone July report. July was the month our sister sites, try-mahjong.com and try-sudoku.com, finished redirecting here, and we wanted a clean month before we compared anything. August is that month. July’s numbers are in this report as the comparison, so nothing is lost.

Two things changed in August. Mobile play is now a much smaller share of the site than it was in spring. And a large batch of new games arrived, from Hearts to Cribbage, that had never been on TrySolitaire before.

Here’s what 147,673 games told us.

The Big Number

147,673 games started. 55,549 won. 37.6% overall win rate.

That’s up 25% on July’s 117,696. The true growth is smaller than that. July’s redirects took full effect on July 20, and the last twelve days of July ran at about 4,200 games a day. August averaged 4,764. On a like-for-like daily basis, the site grew about 13%.

The win rate held. July was 38.2%. Both are well above the 32.6% we reported in May and the 32.9% in June: the jump came in July, not in August.

Within the month, week one averaged 4,391 games a day and week four averaged 5,207. Steady climb, no spikes. The final week ran at 5,417 a day, which is the pace going into September.

Game Popularity

*Mahjong and Sudoku comparisons are inflated by the sister-site redirect. Until July 19, players on try-mahjong and try-sudoku were counted separately. From July 20 they all count here. Some of that “growth” is players moving between columns.

Klondike is 45% of all play, flat on July’s 44%. After falling from 81% in April to 44% in July, its share has settled.

FreeCell fell 14%. It’s the first decline for FreeCell since February, and it comes after a run where it grew almost sevenfold in a single month. 19,738 games is still the third-highest volume on the site. We’ll see whether July was a peak or August was a dip.

Klondike Draw 3 is growing faster than Draw 1. Draw 3 games nearly doubled, from 10,534 to 19,864, while Draw 1 grew 15%. Draw 3 is now 30% of Klondike, up from 21% in July. Nothing changed in the game. More of the players arriving prefer the harder version.

TriPeaks doubled. It has grown every month since a fall in April, and went from 2,296 to 4,920. Eight Off and Forty Thieves both more than tripled from small bases.

Win Rates

Win rate is wins divided by total starts. Abandoned games count as non-wins. Both months here are on the same tracking, so the comparison is clean.

*Mahjong and Sudoku picked up the sister-site players on July 20. The August player pool is different from the July one, so we’re not reading these moves as players getting better or worse.

Eight Off tops the table at 86.0%. It’s the first month Eight Off has enough volume to report on with confidence, and it beats FreeCell, the game it most resembles, by 28 points. Eight Off gives you eight cells instead of four, though four of them start full, you build by suit, and only a King can fill an empty column. More on Eight Off in the spotlight below.

Klondike is up on both settings. Draw 1 rose two points to 35.3% on 46,737 games. Draw 3 rose 1.6 points to 15.5% on 19,864. With samples that size, both moves are real. The Draw 1 rate was 27.6% in June. It has climbed every month since.

Spider moved a lot, and it’s a mix story. 1-suit is up seven points and 2-suit is up ten. 4-suit is down three. At the same time, 2-suit’s share of Spider play fell from 30% to 19% while 4-suit’s rose from 10% to 14%. The likely read: players who were winning at 2-suit moved up to 4-suit. That leaves 2-suit with a pool that finishes more often, and 4-suit with more newcomers who don’t. One change did reach Spider in August: from 7 August, tapping a card sends it to the best destination instead of the first legal one.

Update, 3 October 2026: these games were played under a rule we have since corrected. Until 3 October 2026, our 2- and 4-suit Spider let a run of mixed suits move as one unit, which the standard rules do not allow. The 2- and 4-suit figures here describe that easier game. The game now follows the standard rule, so its 2- and 4-suit games are harder.

Forty Thieves recorded its first wins since June — 24 out of 504. In July it went 0 for 159.

Four games are held out of the table this month while we check their win recording: Canasta, Parallels, and the Mahjong Arrow and Eagle layouts all showed zero or near-zero wins on samples where that shouldn’t happen.

Where the Games Go: Won, Lost, Abandoned

Site-wide, across every game with 50 or more starts:

The mix of games moved a lot in August. The outcomes didn’t. Every line is within a point of July.

As we explained in May, abandonment means different things in different games. In open-ended games like Klondike, the board never tells you you’ve lost. You leave. In forced-ending games like Golf, the game ends itself when you run out of moves. So the abandon rate only says something about player behavior within each type.

Open-ended games:

Klondike’s abandon rate did not move. 70.7% to 70.6%, on 118,000 combined games. That number is now a fixed feature of the site: seven in ten Klondike games get opened and left.

Spider dropped nearly nine points. That fits its win-rate gains. Fewer players walked away, and more of them finished.

Eight Off is the stickiest game we have. Six in seven starts get played to the end.

Forced-ending games went the other way, all five of them:

In these games, abandoning means quitting before the game ends on its own. Five games, five increases, some of them large. We don’t have an explanation yet. When five unrelated games move the same way in the same month, it usually points to one shared cause — a change in who’s arriving, or in how the games load — rather than five separate ones. We’ll be looking at this in September.

Speed & Efficiency

Average duration and moves across all August games with timing data. Games where more than 5% of plays ran over an hour (Sudoku, 2048, Scorpion) have their durations excluded, because tabs left open in the background inflate those averages.

Klondike’s 50-move average across all games is a long way below the 92 moves its winners average. That gap is the abandon rate showing up in a different form: most Klondike games end early.

Winners vs. Non-Winners

Open-ended games rarely record a completed loss, so Klondike, Spider, and FreeCell show winners only.

Klondike winners are the same people they were in February. 92 moves, under ten minutes, 1.4 undos: close to February’s 93 moves and 1.4 undos, after a fourfold increase in Klondike games dealt.

FreeCell, Eight Off, Pyramid and Golf winners have no undo figure. These games did not send their undo count when a game was won, so their winners’ undo read zero, or close to it, whatever the player did.

Sudoku winners used 0.5 hints per game, down from 1.3 in April. Sudoku was the only game that sent its hint count when a game was won, so we can’t compare its hint use with the other games.

Pyramid non-winners’ duration is excluded this month. It read 15 minutes, against 3–4 minutes in every earlier month, and we suspect open tabs.

Mobile vs. Desktop

Mobile is now about one play in seven. In March it was one in three. The shift is confirmed by two separate data sources that agree within a few points, so it’s not a counting error on one table. Part of it is the audience: the site has picked up a large desktop-heavy player base since spring. We’re also checking whether anything changed in how we detect devices, and we’ll say so if it did.

Mobile share by game: Russian 46%, 2048 41%, Sudoku 33%, Golf 27%, Klondike 21%, FreeCell 12%, Spider 11%, Mahjong 11%, Pyramid 8%, TriPeaks 4%.

Win rate by device (games with 50+ starts on both devices):

These rates include games opened with no move made, so they read lower than the win-rate table above, for Mahjong and Sudoku by 14 points or more. The gaps between devices are the point.

A correction to our April post. In Mobile vs Desktop: Who Wins More? we reported mobile players winning Klondike Draw 1 by 21 points. That was a two-week sample right after a tracking fix. On 75,704 Klondike games in August, the mobile edge is two points. Spider’s mobile edge is real and holding at 11 points. The Klondike finding was too strong, and we’re marking that post accordingly.

Desktop wins every game where you scan a board for matches or numbers — Mahjong, Sudoku, Pyramid, TriPeaks. Mobile wins the two games where you build long sequences, Klondike and Spider. Screen size seems to matter for the scanning games and not for the building ones.

Pyramid and TriPeaks on mobile are a problem. 8% win rates against 29–34% on desktop. Both are tap-to-match games with small targets, and the gap is far too big to be about who’s playing. We think it’s the touch experience, and we’re looking at it.

Update, 19 October 2026: in September we changed this table to count only games with at least one move made. On that measure, Pyramid and TriPeaks mobile players won as often as desktop players, or more often. See the September 2026 report.

New This Month

A batch of new games arrived during August: Hearts, Skat, Belote, Spades, Whist, Rummy 500, Euchre, Cribbage, Gin Rummy, and more than thirty lesser-known solitaire variants. These are single-player versions. Twelve cleared 50 starts in their first partial month.

Across all the new games, 79% of starts were abandoned. That’s what a first month looks like: people open a game to see what it is, and most leave. We’ll report on these properly once they have a full month and a settled player base. No month-over-month until then.

Spotlight: Eight Off

Eight Off is a FreeCell cousin. Same idea — every card face up, build down in the tableau, use free cells to park cards — but with eight cells instead of four (four of them full at the deal), building by suit instead of by alternating color, and only Kings in empty columns.

In August it had the highest win rate of any card game on the site (86.0%) and the lowest abandon rate (14.0%). 628 wins from 730 starts. Winners took 97 moves and seven minutes.

Compare FreeCell: 58.1% win rate, 41.8% abandoned. Same family, four fewer cells, and players are three times as likely to walk away. Those four extra cells turn a game you have to think through into a game you can mostly play through.

If FreeCell frustrates you, this is the one to try. Play Eight Off →

What’s Next

September brings the seventh monthly report, and the second on fully clean data.

Coming posts:

• FreeCell: a full data portrait — the game’s first decline is a good moment to look at what four months of growth built.
• Does using undo actually help you win? — July and August give us two clean months across every game.

The most-played game in August was Klondike, with Draw 3 gaining ground. Play it here →

All data is anonymous. TrySolitaire does not track individual users. Win rates are calculated as wins divided by total starts, treating abandons as non-wins. Games with fewer than 50 starts in a month are excluded from win-rate tables. Word and memory games are excluded from solitaire tables. Mahjong win rate is for the Turtle layout only; Mahjong allows up to 5 reshuffles by default, which raises its win rate relative to games without that option. Mahjong and Sudoku month-over-month figures are affected by the sister-site redirect completing on July 20, 2026. Canasta, Parallels, and the Mahjong Arrow and Eagle layouts are excluded pending a check on win recording. Durations are averaged over games with timing data; games where more than 5% of plays exceeded one hour have durations excluded. FreeCell, Eight Off, Pyramid and Golf did not send their undo count when a game was won, so their winners’ undo figures are left out; Sudoku was the only game that sent its hint count on a win. Totals, win rates and abandon rates count each game on the day it ended; the Winners vs. Non-Winners table counts games by the day they started, so its counts can differ slightly from the win-rate table. Device win rates include games with no moves made. Growth from the spring counts every game dealt, played or not: tracking fixes on March 14 and April 14 raised the share of games that sent us an ending, so counts of those games grew faster than play did. Until March 5 the first game of some page loads went unrecorded, so February’s counts are about a tenth low. Data covers August 1–31, 2026. See our June 2026 report for the previous report. For game rules and strategy, see our Klondike Solitaire Guide, FreeCell Guide, and Spider Solitaire Guide.

Published September 1, 2026 | TrySolitaire Blog · Play Free Solitaire