Solitaire Card Games

• Introduction
• Rules of Traditional Solitaire Card Games
• Solitaire Card Game Rules on Pagat.com
• Solitaire Card Game Software and Online Games

Introduction

The earliest references to card games for one player are from Germany and Scandinavia in the second half of the 18th century. Despite the French name Patience used for them, they do not appear in France until some time later, and legends that Napoleon played these games are apocryphal. French was a fashionable language among the leisured classes throughout northern Europe at this time, and French terminology was used in many German games. One of the first known sets of rules is found in Das Neue Königliche L'Hombre (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1797, page 198) which is essentially equivalent to the game we now know as Grandfather Solitaire, but played alternately by two players while others laid bets on the outcome.

The name Patience or its equivalent for one-player card games is still used in Britain and several other European countries, as well as in some other English speaking countries such as Australia. In America, however, one-player card games became known as Solitaires, and from the 1990's, as a result of the extraordinary success of the free Klondike Solitaire program packaged with the Windows operating system for Personal Computers, the American term Solitaire became established worldwide.

By the late 19th century Patience or Solitaire had become a popular pastime for people finding themselves alone with time to spare, and several large collections of one-player card games were published. It also continued to be played in gambling houses, at least in North America, as can be seen from several early 20th century sources in the bibliography of Jeroen Romme's Vegas Solitaire website. In the early 20th century the preferred game for stakes was a version of Sir Tommy, while later Klondike was used. However the success of these has been limited by the fact that they take rather a long time to play compared to modern casino games and require careful supervision if played with real cards.

Further material on the history of Patience or Solitaire card games can be found on David Parlett's page on Patience games. This also suggests a useful classifcation of some of these games according to the objective.

• Sorting. There are many solitaire games (such as Grandfather and Klondike) in which cards are moved around a tableau with the aim of sorting them into order, often creating a pile for each suit ordered by rank.
• Elimination or shedding. Games such as Pyramid in which cards or groups of cards are discarded or eliminated from the game when certain conditions are met, such as making a pair or a particular total, and the aim is to discard all the cards.
• Piling. Games such as Accordion, similar to the above but related cards are combined into piles and smaller piles into larger piles, the aim being to reduce the whole pack to a single pile.
• Pattern Scoring. Games such as Poker Square where are cards played into a layout with the aim of scoring as many points as possible for particular configurations of cards in the layout, or in which the aim is to create a particular pattern in the layout.

There are also games whose objectives don't fit any of these categories. This is especially the case with newly invented games, including some of those published on pagat.com, since inventors often strive for novelty and fresh ideas.

There has been a rapid growth of interest in Solitaire Card Games since the late 20th century, since they proved to be highly suitable for implementation as applications on personal computers, tablets and phones. An electronic version does away with the labour of shuffling and laying out the cards and the need for a large flat surface to play on, allowing the games to be played in almost any environment, even while on the move. The pagat.com Solitaire Card Game Software page lists some of the many apps and packages that are available.

Although most Card Solitaires are designed as one-player games, some of them have been successfully adapted as competitive games for two or more players. With more than one player the name Solitaire no longers seems appropriate, so on pagat.com these are known as Competitive Patience games, and are described in a separate section of the site.

Websites with Rules for Traditional Solitaire Card Games

This website pagat.com is devoted mostly to traditional multi-player games. There are many other sites with excellent and comprehensive collections of solitaire game rules, so rather than duplicating this effort, we provide below links to a selection of these sites. Some of them are associated with software packages offering computer versions of the games.

Randy Rasa's Solitaire Central site contains a wide range of information, including a searchable Solitaire Rulebook with descriptions of numerous games, a searchable collection of reviews of computer solitaire games for download, plus reviews of online solitaire games.

Here is an archive copy of Gordon Bower's Solitaire pages, which have rules of several solitaires, old and new, and investigations of the probability of winning.

For information about Freecell, see Michael Keller's Freecell site, including a tutorial, a catalog of solutions and free computer program Freecell Pro. A further collection of Freecell links can be found at Freecell.org. Michael Keller also runs the Solitaire Laboratory.

The rules section of the BVS Solitaire site has rules for hundreds of solitaire games.

EndersGame's What You Should Know About Solitaire Card Games is the first of a series of articles tracing the history and terminology of Solitaire/Patience games and their recent success as popular computer games.

The Single Player Card Games page of the Card Game Heaven site has rules of several Solitaire games.

James Yates has written pages on Solitaire Strategy and Vegas-style Scoring, which discuss the strategy of Klondike Solitaire.

24.7 Solitaire has a collection of articles related to solitare card games.

Solitaire Card Game Rules on Pagat.com

Although we do not proactively collect them, users of pagat.com sometimes contribute rules of Solitaire Card Games, often of games they have invented themselves. In the index below, invented games are listed in italics.