History of Solitaire: From Patience Games to Your Screen

The history of Solitaire goes back more than two centuries. One-player card games, known as "patience", first show up in German game books in the late 1700s, spread through France and Britain in the 1800s, and multiplied into hundreds of variations. The version most people now call Solitaire, Klondike, became world-famous when it shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Today you can deal a hand in seconds in the free Solitaire game, with the same rules people have played for generations.

The history of Solitaire starts with patience

Nobody knows who invented solitaire, and the earliest written traces are a little uncertain. The first known descriptions of a card game for one player appear in German game books from the last decades of the 18th century. Historians quote different books and dates from the 1780s and 1790s, so it's safest to say the game was known in Germany by around the time of the French Revolution.

Some of those early descriptions are not quite what we'd recognise. One describes a patience game watched by onlookers who bet on whether it would come out. There are also suggestions that laying out cards alone was linked to fortune-telling: if the cards "came out", your wish would come true. That idea fits the name the game took in many countries.

Patience, solitaire and other names

The names tell part of the story:

Name	Where it's used	What it suggests
Patience	Britain and many other countries	The virtue the game demands
Solitaire	United States and Canada	A game for one
Cabale	Some early German and French sources	Something hidden or secret
Réussite	France	"Success", whether the game comes out

In Britain, "solitaire" usually means a different game: the peg-board puzzle where pegs jump over each other. That's why British readers often know the card game as patience.

The 19th century: hundreds of games

During the 1800s, patience became a popular pastime in France and then Britain. Books of patience games were published, each collecting dozens of layouts with their own rules. Many games carry names from that era, sometimes royal or military ones.

A popular legend says Napoleon passed the time with patience during his exile on St Helena, and several games bear his name. There's no firm evidence for the story, and the names may have been marketing as much as history, but it shows how fashionable the game had become.

By the late 19th century, the game was well established in the United States as well, where "solitaire" became the usual name.

Where Klondike came from

Klondike is the layout with seven columns, a stock and four foundations built from ace to king. Its name is usually linked to the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s, in Canada's Yukon, though the details of how the name stuck aren't well documented. It shares its basic idea with older games: build down in alternating colours in the tableau, build up by suit on the foundations.

What made Klondike special was the balance. It's simple enough to learn in a minute, but deals vary a lot: some come out easily, some need careful thought, and some can't be won at all. That mix of luck and skill kept people dealing "just one more".

You'll find the full rules in our guide on how to play Solitaire.

1990: Solitaire on every PC

The moment that turned Klondike into a household name came in 1990, when Microsoft included a Solitaire game with Windows 3.0. It was written by Wes Cherry, who had been a summer intern at Microsoft, with a card design by Susan Kare. It's often said that it was included partly to help people get used to dragging things with a mouse, and dragging cards from column to column certainly did that.

Because it came free with Windows, millions of people played it at work and at home. Other single-player card games followed:

• FreeCell goes back to a version written in 1978 by Paul Alfille for the PLATO computer system, and became widely known after it shipped with Windows 95.
• Spider Solitaire came with the Microsoft Plus! 98 add-on in 1998 and later versions of Windows.

The full story of those PC classics is in our post on classic Windows games.

Solitaire today

Solitaire now lives on phones, tablets and in the browser. The game hasn't changed much, but a few conveniences make it friendlier:

• Undo, so a wrong move isn't the end of a game.
• Hints, for when you can't see the next move.
• Tap to move, which sends a card to the best place for you.
• An automatic finish, once every card is face up.

Our free Solitaire game has all four, with draw-one and draw-three modes and your best time saved in your browser. If you want to win more often, our tips for winning Solitaire cover the strategy.

Other patience games worth trying

Patience was never just one game. Two of its descendants are favourites in their own right:

• FreeCell, where every card is visible from the start and nearly every deal can be won.
• Spider Solitaire, played with two decks, where you build full suits from king to ace.

Deal a hand

After two centuries, the game still works the same way: a shuffled deck, a bit of luck and a lot of patience. Deal one now in the free Solitaire game. It runs in your browser with no download or sign-up.