A History of Solitaire (Patience)

We remember it as the game that came with the computer, but card solitaire goes back to the middle of the 18th century — and the oldest patience on record was not a solitary game at all. Here is its story, told only from sources that hold up.

September 23, 2026 · 7-minute read

It began as a bet

The card-game historian David Parlett puts the earliest safe date for patience at about 1758, on the evidence of a biography of the German composer C. F. C. Fasch, published by his friend C. F. Zelter in Berlin in 1801.

The earliest printed rules are in the 1788 edition of the German games compendium Das neue Königliche L'Hombre (Parlett cites the 1791 edition). That first patience was a game for two: each took a turn as "the player" while onlookers bet on the outcome. Parlett suggests people may first have played alone to practise for the contest. An early English reference to patience as a solitary pastime is a letter in The Country Spectator of 19 February 1793, whose writer, filling the hour before dinner, "had begun the game of Patience, to which I have often had recourse on these occasions".

German or Scandinavian?

Following A. S. C. Ross and F. G. Healey, Parlett thinks patience most likely German or Scandinavian in origin, and Ross and Healey favour Sweden. A Swedish girl's journal of captivity in Russia in 1808–09 records that "Major Hjärne played patience with my father", and J. D. Valerius's 1809 poem "Mitt spel" ends with the line "Patience against my Fate".

Patience or solitaire?

"Patience" is a French word, but Parlett stresses that this says nothing about where the game began: French was the common language of cultured Europe when it appeared. Modern French more often calls it réussite ("success"), and Danish and Norwegian use Kabale ("secret knowledge"). Parlett notes that these names, and the fact that fortune-telling card layouts are not reliably reported before about 1765, point to a possible fortune-telling origin — a plausible theory, not an established fact.

"Patience" is also the earliest recorded name in both British and American sources. "Solitaire" became the usual North American term in the 20th century, and Parlett says it has become the more global word since 1990, when Microsoft bundled Solitaire with Windows — a game that was really Klondike. He prefers "patience" because "solitaire" can mean any one-player game, peg solitaire included, and because patience can also be played competitively.

From Moscow to Boston

The oldest known book devoted entirely to patience appeared in Moscow in 1826, and at least six more collections followed in Sweden before 1850. The first French collection, Le Livre des patiences, was already in its third edition in 1842, according to Parlett.

A translation of the French book, Games of Patience, was in its second edition in London by 1859, and the bibliographer Frederic Jessel (1905) called it "the first book on Patience published in England". Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience, often called the first, has an undated first edition; the earliest dated editions are from 1874–75. America's first was Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney's Patience, drawn from the French book (Boston, copyright 1869).

Patience in fiction

In Dickens's Great Expectations (1861) the convict Magwitch plays "a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own", marking his wins with his jack-knife. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, Pierre, unsure whether to join the army in 1812, lays out a patience: "If this patience comes out ... it means... what does it mean?" It comes out; he stays in Moscow anyway.

Did Napoleon play patience?

The story that Napoleon passed his exile on St Helena playing patience is unsupported. He is documented playing vingt-un, piquet and whist. Ross and Healey traced the tale to a misread incident at the whist table: Napoleon sent Las Cases off to keep dealing a sticky pack until the cards ran easily, and an 1816 account in the Quarterly Review called this "this solitary game of patience". Game names like "Napoleon at St Helena" did the rest. Empress Josephine, however, did play: Parlett reports she was never without a double pack of cards on her table.

The books that collected and sorted the games

After Lady Cadogan's book, "a Cadogan" came to mean any book of patience games in England. Albert H. Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith's The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games (1949) was, in Parlett's view, the first to classify the games systematically. Parlett's own The Penguin Book of Patience (1979) covers about 400 games, takes the classification further, and gives us the line "Patience is the mental equivalent of jogging."

Where this site's five games fit

Sorting patiences goes back to "Cavendish" (Henry Jones), who in 1890 separated "definite" problems — every card visible, solved by calculation — from "indefinite" ones that call for judgement. Parlett uses two axes. By information, games are closed (face-down cards or a stock), open (everything visible from the start) or half-open. By mechanism, they are builders, packers (which build descending sequences on the layout before moving cards to the foundations) or non-builders. Applying those axes to this site's five games gives the table below.

Golf and TriPeaks play cards one rank up or down onto a single pile, regardless of suit. Golf is also known as "One Foundation"; sources classify these games inconsistently, so we simply call them Golf-type games. Baker's Game was described by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1968, and FreeCell is Paul Alfille's change of it to alternating colours. TriPeaks, the youngest of the five, first shipped in a Windows Entertainment Pack.

Into the computer

Around 1978 Alfille wrote the first FreeCell for PLATO, the University of Illinois's educational computer system. Jim Horne, who also learned the game on PLATO, wrote Microsoft's Windows version. With its 32,000 numbered deals it first shipped on Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 (1991–92) and became famous once it was bundled with Windows 95.

Before that, on 22 May 1990, Windows 3.0 shipped with "Windows Solitaire", a version of Klondike programmed by the intern Wes Cherry, with cards designed by Susan Kare. Microsoft says it helped people learn to drag and drop with a mouse. The add-on Entertainment Packs carried three of this site's games: Golf (Pack 1, 1990), FreeCell (Pack 2) and Robert Hogue's TriPeaks (Pack 3).

With Windows 8 in 2012, Microsoft Solitaire Collection bundled Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid and TriPeaks into one free, ad-supported app. In 2019 Microsoft Solitaire entered the World Video Game Hall of Fame at The Strong National Museum of Play, which says it "has likely been installed on more than a billion computers".

Solitaire at the office

Microsoft marketed the Entertainment Packs for office PCs with slogans like "No more boring coffee breaks". According to The Strong, the 1990 Solitaire was to have had a "Boss Key" that hid the game behind a fake spreadsheet, but it was removed before release. In 1998 Clifford Stoll told Time that no company would hand its sales force a deck of cards, yet give them $2,000 computers and "you know they're going to play some solitaire because it's the second or third most common program run". In 2006 New York mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a city worker after seeing solitaire on his screen: "The workplace is not an appropriate place for games."

How often can you win?

In 1946, playing solitaire while recovering from an illness, the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam wondered about the chances that a Canfield would come out, and thought of laying it out many times and counting successes — the idea he later recalled as the start of the Monte Carlo method. Whether his "Canfield" was today's Klondike is unknown.

In 2004 Xiang Yan, Persi Diaconis and two co-authors wrote: "It is one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics that we cannot determine the odds of winning the common game of solitaire." Playing Klondike with every card's position known, a former president of the American Mathematical Society won 36.6% of 2,000 games; their best computer strategy won 70.20% of 200 test games. Charlie Blake and Ian P. Gent later computed winnable shares under the same all-cards-known assumption: Klondike (draw three) 81.945% (draw one: about 90.48%), Baker's Game about 75.05%, Golf about 45.11%, FreeCell about 99.9989%. In Klondike and Golf, real players who cannot see the face-down cards or the stock win far less often. This site's own solver checks land close by: 25.0% of 5,000 Baker's Game deals and 55.6% of 5,000 Golf deals had no solution (the rule variants differ slightly, so this is not a strict comparison).

Windows FreeCell's deals were checked by hand. In August 1994 Dave Ring recruited more than 100 volunteers online to solve all 32,000 of them, and by April 1995 every one had been reported solved except #11982.

Timeline

Sources

1. History of Patience/Solitaire — David Parlett
2. Karl Friedrich Christian Fasch (Zelter, 1801) — Internet Archive
3. Das neue königliche l'Hombre (1788) — Google Books
4. Das Neue Königliche L'Hombre – 1788 — Vegas Solitaire
5. The Country Spectator, No. XX (1793) — Internet Archive
6. The Origin of Patience Games in English — The World of Playing Cards
7. A Bibliography of Works in English on Playing Cards and Gaming — Frederic Jessel, 1905
8. Solitaire Bibliography — Michael Keller, Solitaire Laboratory
9. Solitaire — Wikipedia
10. Lady Adelaide Cadogan — Wikipedia
11. Great Expectations — Charles Dickens, Project Gutenberg
12. War and Peace (tr. Aylmer Maude) — Leo Tolstoy, Project Gutenberg
13. Did Napoleon really play Solitaire? — SolitaireCat
14. Black Hole — David Parlett
15. Klondike (solitaire) — Wikipedia
16. What game was played at Canfield's — Michael Keller, Solitaire Laboratory
17. Pastimes for Sick Children (1926) — Internet Archive
18. FreeCell FAQ — Michael Keller, Solitaire Laboratory
19. Microsoft Entertainment Pack — Wikipedia
20. Microsoft Solitaire Collection — Wikipedia
21. Microsoft Solitaire — World Video Game Hall of Fame — The Strong
22. Celebrating 30 Years of Microsoft Solitaire — Xbox Wire, 2020
23. Do Computers Really Save Money? — TIME, 1998 (archived)
24. NYC mayor fires man playing solitaire at work — NBC News, 2006
25. Hitting the jackpot: the birth of the Monte Carlo method — Los Alamos National Laboratory
26. Solitaire: Man Versus Machine — Yan, Diaconis, Rusmevichientong, Van Roy, 2004
27. The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire and Many Other Patience Games — Blake & Gent

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