Solitaire | Classic Card Game, Rules & Strategy (2024)

solitaire, family of card games played by one person. Solitaire was originally called (in various spellings) either patience, as it still is in England, Poland, and Germany, or cabale, as it still is in Scandinavian countries.

The terms patience and solitaire have been applied to indicate any one-player card-related activity, including building card houses, flipping cards into a hat, and arranging them into mathematical “magic squares.” However, the vast majority of card solitaires, reflecting the most usual understanding of the word, denote an activity whereby the player starts with a shuffled pack and attempts, by following a more-or-less complicated series of maneuvers specified by the rules, to get all the cards arranged in numerical order, often also separated into their component suits. Some games of this type, such as spite and malice, racing demon, and spit, are played competitively by two or more players, thus calling into question the suitability of the term solitaire.

Card solitaires originated toward the end of the 18th century, apparently in the Baltic region of Europe and possibly as a form of fortune-telling; whether or not a game “came out” supposedly indicated whether or not the player’s desire would come true. This origin is suggested by a surge of interest in cartomancy (see tarot) at that time, a marked similarity between the way cards are laid out for both activities, the significance of the word cabale (“secret knowledge”), and some contemporary literary references. A German book of 1793 represents patiencespiel as a contest between two players, each of whom in turn plays a game of what appears to be “grandfather” patience while they and the bystanders lay bets on the outcome. The oldest known collection of patience games was published in Russia in 1826; others followed in Germany and France. The first English-language collections appeared in the 1860s, many of them translations from French or German. Charles Dickens represented Magwitch as playing “a complicated kind of patience with ragged cards” in Great Expectations (1861), and Queen Victoria’s German husband, Albert, was a keen player.

Literally hundreds of different solitaires are on record, though many are slight variations of one another and all can be classified into perhaps a score of basic types. In the 19th century players went in for elaborate pictorial layouts with descriptive titles—such as zodiac, flower garden, British constitution, and the like—many of them purely mechanical exercises requiring little thought. The following century saw a preference for more-intelligent games based on relatively simple layouts with many, sometimes all, cards exposed from the outset, making them games of perfect or near-perfect information. The advent of the personal computer in the late 20th century gave solitaires a new lease on life. Many traditional games became available as software packages, and more-or-less new ones were developed for the medium, though most of these are minor variations on well-worn themes.

Most solitaires exhibit two or more of the following components:

• A place where one or more piles of cards are to be built in numerical order, often in the same suit. This place may be empty to start with or marked with “foundation cards,” typically the ace of each suit to be built up in sequence to the kings.

• A shuffled deck of cards, or two decks shuffled together, forming a stock from which the player turns (usually) one card at a time and plays it to one of the building piles if it properly continues the sequence.

• A tableau (layout) of cards, which may be filled or empty to start with, in which cards that cannot be added to a building pile may be temporarily stored, provided that they follow specified rules governing their placement there.

• A wastepile, to which is thrown faceup a card that, when turned from the stock, cannot legally be played to a building pile or to the tableau.

Cards can usually be moved from one place to another as shown in the figure.

In some games, such as sultan and quadrille, the wastepile is turned down and used as a new stock after a player has gone through all the cards in the original stock. This is called a redeal. Some games do not permit any redeals. Most allow a limited number of redeals and some an unlimited number.

Some games have no stock or wastepile. Instead, all the cards are dealt faceup to a tableau at the start, and play consists in transferring available cards (as defined by the rules of the particular game) from one place to another. These are games of perfect information and, hence, of creative skill.

A tableau usually consists of a number of card piles. The top (or exposed) card of each pile is usually available for adding to a building pile if it fits or for transferring to the top of another tableau pile provided it follows a specified rule. A typical rule is that it must be one rank lower than the card it is played to and opposite in colour—for example, to a column headed by a black 6, one may play a red 5, then a black 4, and so on. Some games tighten the rule by requiring the added card to match the suit of the previous card; others relax it by imposing no restriction as to suit or colour. Many games form the tableau into a descriptive or pictorial pattern, giving the game its theme and title.

Some games, notably strategy, combine the tableau and wastepile into a tableau consisting of several wastepiles. It differs from a conventional tableau in that any card may be played to any wastepile regardless of rank or suit but cannot be transferred from one wastepile to another. Such a game is usually one of skill, requiring the player to assess which of several wastepiles will most reliably bring the game to a successful conclusion. Some games, such as spider and scorpion, combine the tableau with the building piles, so that building takes place within the tableau itself.

Some games add a component called a reserve. This consists of a number (specified by the particular game) of notional spaces to which individual cards may be transferred on a temporary basis, usually from the tableau. This is a feature of the popular computer game FreeCell, itself a double-deck version of an old game called eight off.

Probably the best-known solitaire, long before it hit computer screens as part of a standard software package, is known as klondike in the United States and (mistakenly) canfield in Britain. Canfield was the name of a Saratoga saloon owner who in the 1890s would sell players a deck of cards for $50 and pay them $5 for each card they managed to play off in the game previously known as demon.