The history of Solitaire

Solitaire, called patience in Britain and much of the world, is probably the most played card game there is. Its early history is patchy, but the broad story runs from European parlours in the 1700s to almost every computer on the planet.

Beginnings in 18th-century Europe

The first clear references to card games for one player appear in northern Europe in the late 1700s, in German game books. The names give a sense of the game's character. English speakers called it patience. The French called it réussite, meaning success.

You may have heard that the game was invented by a French nobleman in prison, or that Napoleon played it in exile. Neither story has good evidence behind it. Napoleon's name did end up on several games, including Forty Thieves, which is also known as Napoleon at St Helena.

Cards and fortune telling

Early patience games sat close to cartomancy, the practice of laying out cards to read the future. Setting out a spread to see how it falls is not so different from dealing a patience game to see if it comes out. Through the 1800s the two drifted apart, and patience became a game played for its own sake.

Books that spread the rules

Patience became a fashionable pastime across Europe in the 19th century, and books of rules helped it travel. In Britain, Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience, first published around 1870, collected dozens of games in one volume and stayed in print for decades. Books like it did a lot to settle how each game was played.

Klondike takes over

Of the hundreds of patience games, one became the default in North America: Klondike. It is generally thought to be named after the Klondike gold rush in Canada's Yukon in the late 1890s. Its simple shape, seven columns, a stock and four foundations, made it the game people learned first. In the United States the word solitaire came to mean Klondike specifically.

The Windows years

The biggest moment in the game's history came in 1990, when Microsoft shipped a version of Klondike called Solitaire with Windows 3.0. Part of the reason was practical: it taught people to use a mouse, dragging and dropping cards without thinking about it. Free, quick and already installed on office computers everywhere, it became one of the most used programs Microsoft ever made.

Other games followed. FreeCell, created by Paul Alfille in 1978 on the PLATO education system, reached a huge audience through Windows in the 1990s. Spider Solitaire arrived on Windows a few years later and became just as familiar.

Solitaire today

Today solitaire is played in browsers and on phones in dozens of variations: Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid, Golf, Forty Thieves and many more. The appeal hasn't changed in 250 years. It's a calm game you can play anywhere, against nobody but the deal.