The history of Solitaire and Patience

Patience: a game for one, invented late

Card games for a single player are surprisingly modern. Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century, but games of patience — one player, no opponent — do not appear until the late eighteenth century, in northern Europe.

The earliest printed collections are German and Scandinavian, from the 1780s, and the original context matters: several early patiences were played as fortune-telling or as a way to settle a question, with the game's success or failure as the answer. The word "patience" itself captures the attitude — a test of endurance and, in some accounts, of fate.

The games spread through France (where they are still réussite, "success") and reached Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, where the first English books appeared in the 1870s. Lady Adelaide Cadogan's collection is the usual landmark.

Klondike and the gold rush

The specific patience we call Solitaire acquired its name — Klondike — in the 1890s, from the gold rush in the Yukon. The association is with prospectors playing it through long northern evenings, which may be romanticised, but the name stuck and is now used worldwide for this particular layout.

American usage shifted the terminology: in Britain the family is "patience" and Klondike is one member; in North America the whole family became "solitaire" and Klondike became the default. Both are correct, which is why the same game has two names depending on who taught you.

1990: the most played computer game in history

Microsoft Solitaire shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990. It was written by Wes Cherry, then an intern, with card artwork by Susan Kare — the designer responsible for much of the original Macintosh's visual language. Cherry was famously not paid for it.

Like Minesweeper, it was included for a practical reason: it taught users to drag and drop with a mouse, a gesture that was new and unintuitive to people who had spent a decade at a command line. It worked so well that Solitaire became a fixture of office life and a recurring subject of productivity complaints, including at least one widely reported firing.

The game was removed from the default Windows 8 install in 2012 and returned as the Microsoft Solitaire Collection, which reportedly reaches tens of millions of players a month. In 2019 Microsoft Solitaire was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame — an odd honour for a card layout from the 1890s, and a well-earned one for the software that carried it.

What computers found out about Klondike

Klondike is unusual among classic games in that its basic question — what fraction of deals can be won? — resisted analysis for a long time. The difficulty is that the stock is hidden, so the game is one of imperfect information, and the number of ways to play a deal is enormous.

Researchers attack a simplified version called thoughtful solitaire, in which the player knows the location of every card from the start. That removes the hidden information and yields an upper bound on what any human could achieve. Monte Carlo planning studies have shown that a large majority of draw-three deals — on the order of four in five — are winnable under those conditions.

The practical conclusion for a player is liberating: if you lose, it was probably not winnable. And the gap between the thoughtful bound and ordinary play is where skill lives — which is exactly what the strategy guide is about.

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