Patience (game)

Woman in cell playing patience by Nickolas Muray.

Patience or solitaire in the US, is a genre of tabletop games, consisting of card games that can be played by a single player. Patience games can also be played in a multiplayer fashion.

In the US, the term solitaire is often used specifically to refer to solitaire with cards, while in other counties solitaire specifically to refers to Peg solitaire. Both Solitaire and Patience are sometimes used to refer specifically to Klondike form of Patience.

Overview

The purpose of patience generally involves manipulating a layout of cards with a goal of sorting them in some manner. However it is possible to play the same games competitively (often a head to head race) and cooperatively.

Patience games typically involve dealing cards from a shuffled deck into a prescribed arrangement on a tabletop, from which the player attempts to reorder the deck by suit and rank through a series of moves transferring cards from one place to another under prescribed restrictions. Some games allow for the reshuffling of the deck(s), and/or the placement of cards into new or "empty" locations. In the most familiar, general form of Patience, the object of the game is to build up four blocks of cards going from ace to king in each suit, taking cards from the layout if they appear on the table.

There is a vast array of variations on the patience theme, using either one or more decks of cards, with rules of varying complexity and skill levels. Many of these have been converted to electronic form and are available as computer games. Examples of variants on the familiar Patience theme that may be played with an ordinary packet of cards include Bisley and Prince Albert. Basic forms of Klondike solitaire and FreeCell come with every current installation of Microsoft Windows, apart from Windows 8, wherein six unique card games can be downloaded for free in its app store in the form of the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.

History

The game is most likely German or Scandinavian in origin.^{[citation needed]} The game became popular in France in the early 19th Century reaching England and America in the latter half. Patience was first mentioned in literature shortly after cartomantic layouts were developed circa 1765. The earliest known recording of a game of patience occurred in 1783 in the German game anthology Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel. Before this, there were no literary mentions of such games in large game compendiums such as Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester (1674) and Abbé Bellecour's Academie des Jeux (1674).

Klondike is a widely known form of card solitaire.

There is a tradition^{[citation needed]} in Germany to use "patience" as a guide to the future. This assumes that a person’s luck will vary and important matters should not be initiated when the cards are not favourable. If there are no wins for a number of tries it spells caution. If you win at the first try times are good, thus the immediate future can be used for important decisions.

Napoleon was said to have "played patience" during his exile; however from written accounts, he played Vingt-Un, Piquet, and Whist but not Patience. The story is thought to have arisen from a misinterpretation. Nonetheless, many patience games were named after him, such as Napoleon at St. Helena, Napoleon's Square, etc.

Attributed to Mendeleev's enjoyment of the game is his early periodic table, wherein elements were ordered by increasing atomic weight whilst simultaneously aligned into columns based on similar chemical properties.

Magda Goebbels played patience in the Führerbunker after she killed her six children.

The first collection of patience card games in the English language is attributed to Lady Adelaide Cadogan through her Illustrated Games of Patience, published in about 1870 and reprinted several times. Other collections quickly followed such as Patience by E. D. Cheney (1869), Amusement for Invalids by Annie B. Henshaw (1870), and later Dick's Games of Patience, published by Dick and Fitzgerald. Other books about patience written towards the end of the 19th century were by H. E. Jones (a.k.a. Cavendish), Angelo Lewis (a.k.a. Professor Hoffman), Basil Dalton, Ernest Bergholt, and Mary Whitmore Jones.

A Russian version of the game, 'Fools', is played by Grushenka in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

See also

• List of patience games
• Glossary of Patience terms, not including peg solitaire.
• Patience sorting, a computer algorithm
• Software Patience games:
  • Eric's Ultimate Solitaire
  • FreeCell (Windows)
  • Pretty Good Solitaire
  • PySol
  • Solitaire (Windows)
  • Spider Solitaire (Windows)
  • Soltrio Solitaire

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Solitaire.

• Patience on the Open Directory Project
• Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience, by Adelaide Cadogan, 1914, from Project Gutenberg
• Games of patience for one or more players, second series, by Mary Whitmore Jones, about 1898, original book-scan from Archive.org

v t e Patience or Solitaire(US) - (list) Adding and pairing Baroness Fourteen Out Gay Gordons Golf Monte Carlo Nestor Pyramid Bisley Baker's Dozen Capricieuse Martha Perseverance Castle Congress Fortress Seahaven Towers Canfield American Toad Duchess Eagle Wing Fan Alternation Bristol Flower Garden House in the Woods Intelligence La Belle Lucie The Plot Shamrocks Forty Thieves Deuces Diplomat Emperor Miss Milligan Napoleon's Square FreeCell Baker's Game Eight Off Penguin Stalactites Klondike Agnes Batsford Gargantua King Albert Seven Devils Westcliff Yukon Non-builder Accordion Clock Gaps Maze Perpetual Motion Poker Squares Royal Marriage Pocket Decade One-Handed Spider Auld Lang Syne Blockade Curds and Whey Labyrinth Mrs. Mop Scorpion Simple Simon Other Aces and Kings Algerian Black Hole Carpet King's Audience The Clock Glossary Grandfather's Clock