Tiny Solitaire

A little game of Klondike, always one click away in your Windows tray.

Just you and the cards

• Classic Klondike with draw-one or draw-three and unlimited trips through the stock.
• Click a card and its destination, drag cards or complete runs, or double-click a card to send it to a foundation. Cards glide between piles when drawing, moving, undoing, or dealing again; auto-finish plays its moves in sequence. Dragged cards lift off the table and follow your cursor from the spot you grabbed. Drops use the card's overlap with a pile, with forgiving edges and the space below each column available too; invalid drops or Esc glide cards back to their pile. Motion respects Windows animation settings.
• Undo the last 100 moves, ask for a hint, restart the same deal, or start a new one.
• Auto-finish from the overflow menu once the stock and waste are empty and every tableau card is face up.
• Win a deal for a colorful fireworks celebration lasting about eight seconds. With Windows animations disabled, a quiet "You won!" message appears instead.
• A distraction-free table: just the cards and an icon-only command row, with hints and settings available on demand.
• Four repeating emoji card backs: Emoji garden, Stargazer, Fruit salad, and Cat nap.
• Green appearance by default fills the entire flyout with classic solitaire green. Light, Dark, and System are also available. System follows the taskbar theme; the tray icon always follows the taskbar, independently of your game preference.
• Automatic local saving, including undo history. Pick up where you left off after dismissing or restarting the app.
• Optional Start with Windows, off by default.

Left-click the tray icon to open or hide the game. Right-click for Open Tiny Solitaire, Settings, and Exit. Closing the flyout hides it; only Exit quits. Settings live inside the same flyout.

Draw-count changes apply to the next new game, not to the active deal. Replacing a game in progress requires confirmation.

Shortcut	Action
D	Draw or recycle the stock
H	Show a hint
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Ctrl+N	New deal
Esc	Back from settings, deselect a card, or hide to tray
Alt+Left	Back from settings

Build columns down in alternating colors; only kings fill empty columns. Foundations build from ace to king in one suit. Scoring gives +10 for a foundation move, +5 from waste to tableau, and +5 for revealing a card. Returning a foundation card costs 15; recycling costs 100 in draw-one or 20 in draw-three. Scores never go below zero.

Install

Requires Windows 10 2004 or later, or Windows 11, on x64 or ARM64.

Download TinySolitaire.appinstaller and open it. Windows installs the right version for your PC and keeps it updated. There is no Store listing yet, or you can build from source below.

Privacy and footprint

No accounts, API keys, analytics, advertising, or network requests. Everything happens on your device.

Your deal is written atomically to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\<package-family>\LocalState\game.json. Preferences use the package's local settings. Invalid saved games are rejected with a visible warning rather than crashing. Unhandled exception diagnostics are written to %TEMP%\TinySolitaire-crash.log.

There is no hidden polling or game-clock timer. A dismissed flyout stays warm briefly for instant reopening, then closes after one minute and releases idle memory. The app keeps only its tray icon and single-instance plumbing alive.

Build from source

Install the .NET 10 SDK, the Windows App SDK C# development tools, and WinApp CLI 0.7+:

winget install Microsoft.WinAppCli
winapp run . --detach

The project is a packaged WinUI 3 app scaffolded with winapp new. Use winapp run, not a direct executable launch. A second launch signals the running instance to open the flyout. winapp run --clean resets the development app's saved games and preferences.

Run the platform-independent rules tests:

dotnet test .\tests\TinySolitaire.Tests.csproj

Run the local UI acceptance script on an unlocked desktop:

pwsh -File .\scripts\ui-tests.ps1

Start a fresh deal before the full UI suite. The script changes game progress and preferences, exercises input on the local desktop, and writes screenshots and structured results under artifacts\ui-tests. Use -TestFilter 'emoji|green' for focused checks or -AppPid <id> to reuse a running instance.

To publish a release, bump Identity/@Version in Package.appxmanifest, push, then run .\build-msix-for-gh.ps1. It builds a signed x64 + ARM64 .msixbundle plus the .appinstaller feed and creates a draft GitHub release. Publish the draft without changing its tag, then run .\build-msix-for-gh.ps1 -VerifyPublished. -SkipRelease -NoSign checks the build without signing or publishing.

For a release build and launch:

winapp run . -c Release --detach

build-msix-for-gh.ps1 builds signed x64 and ARM64 MSIX packages and can publish a GitHub release once a repository, signing certificate, and release configuration are available. Use -SkipRelease to package without publishing.

Pure rules and source-generated save serialization live in Game\; the test project links those files without loading WinUI. Supplied suit artwork is in Assets\Suits, and tray-icon source artwork is in branding.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.