The History of Solitaire

That's the short arc: two centuries from candlelit card tables in the Baltic to the most-installed computer game in history. The longer story has fortune-tellers, a debunked Napoleon legend, Victorian aristocrats writing rulebooks, and a Microsoft intern who never got paid a cent for the most-played version of it. Worth telling properly.

A sourcing note first, because solitaire history is full of confidently repeated guesses. Where a claim below is solid, it's cited. Where it's tradition or legend, it's labeled as exactly that.

Patience before it was solitaire

One-player card games appear in the written record surprisingly late. Playing cards had been in Europe since the 1300s, but the first traces of patience games show up in the second half of the 18th century, in the German and Baltic sphere. Card game historian David Parlett, whose history of patience is the most careful account available, points to a reference from around 1758 in connection with the German composer Carl Friedrich Fasch, followed by descriptions in German game anthologies in the early 1790s and mentions in Swedish sources shortly after 1800.

Two details from this era complicate the modern picture of solitaire as a solo pastime. Early patience was often played as a two-player contest, each player racing through their own layout or taking turns on one. And it carried a whiff of fortune-telling: the deal comes out or it doesn't, and people read meaning into which. The German name for some early forms, "Cabale," gestures at exactly that occult flavor.

The first known book devoted to patience games was published in Moscow in 1826, per Parlett, with Swedish collections following soon after. The geography of those early sources, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, the Baltic, is the best evidence we have for where the genre grew up. France, often credited as the birthplace, appears to have adopted patience slightly later, though it gave the genre much of its vocabulary (tableau, talon) and, in the southern European naming tradition, the word solitaire itself.

The 19th century: patience goes respectable

By the mid-1800s, patience had climbed the social ladder across Europe. France had a dedicated patience literature by the 1840s. In England, the game got its establishment stamp when Lady Adelaide Cadogan published Illustrated Games of Patience in the early 1870s, the first significant English collection and a book that stayed in print for decades. A stream of English-language collections followed: Cavendish, Mary Whitmore Jones (who filled seven volumes), and in America, Ednah Cheney's 1870 collection.

Charles Dickens has Magwitch playing "a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of cards" in Great Expectations (1861), a nice snapshot of how ordinary the game had become.

And the famous Napoleon story? Tradition says he whiled away his exile on St Helena playing patience, and several variants ("Napoleon at St Helena," still a common name for Forty Thieves) were named on the strength of it. Parlett reports the story doesn't survive scrutiny: it seems to trace to a misread account of a whist evening. His wife Josephine, on the other hand, apparently did play patience. The variant names stuck anyway. Card games have never let facts spoil good branding.

Where "Klondike" comes from

The specific game this site is devoted to, seven columns, alternating colors, stock and waste, shows up in American sources around the turn of the 20th century, and its name points straight at the Klondike gold rush of 1896 to 1899 in Canada's Yukon territory.

The traditional story is that prospectors played the game in mining camps through the long subarctic winters, and it's a believable one: a game of long odds and occasional strikes, played alone, is almost too fitting for a gold camp. But honesty requires the label: this is tradition, not documentation. What's documented is the name itself appearing in American game collections in the early 1900s, within living memory of the rush.

The name has caused confusion ever since. In some older books, especially British ones, near-identical rules appear under the name "Canfield," which Americans use for a completely different game named after a casino owner. If you've ever found two contradictory rule sets under one name in old card game books, that tangle is why. What everyone agrees on today: the seven-column game is Klondike, whatever your grandmother's book called it. The full modern rules are on our how to play page.

1990: the intern who changed everything

For its first two centuries, patience was popular but unremarkable, one genre among many in the card game books. Then it got bundled with an operating system.

In 1988, a Microsoft summer intern named Wes Cherry wrote a Klondike game for Windows. Microsoft shipped it with Windows 3.0 in 1990, with card faces designed by Susan Kare, the artist behind the original Macintosh icons. The company's semi-official justification was education: Solitaire taught a generation of office workers how to drag and drop with a mouse at a time when that gesture was genuinely unfamiliar.

Cherry, famously, was paid nothing for it beyond his internship. He has said in interviews he's fine with that, which is more grace than most of us could manage about one of the most-used programs ever written.

The effect was hard to overstate. Solitaire shipped on hundreds of millions of machines, embedded itself in office culture (and office time-wasting scandals), and permanently fused the word "solitaire" with this one specific game in the public mind. The reason people say solitaire when they mean Klondike, untangled on our solitaire vs Klondike page, dates precisely to that 1990 release.

Windows also quietly standardized the details: draw 1 and draw 3 as the two stock modes, the point values that became "standard scoring," and Vegas mode with its buy-in and payouts. Those conventions, covered in our scoring guide, are Windows conventions as much as card-table ones.

After Windows: the web era

The story since 1990 is distribution, not rule changes. Solitaire moved to the browser in the 2000s, to phones in the 2010s, and along the way picked up features paper cards never offered: unlimited undo, hints, guaranteed-winnable deals, shared daily challenges, and statistics.

The computers also finally answered a question players had argued about for a century: how many deals can actually be won? Serious computational work in the 2000s and the exhaustive Solvitaire study in 2019 put real numbers on it. Those numbers, and what they mean for your own win rate, live on our odds of winning page.

Two hundred and some years in, the game itself is barely changed: a shuffled deck, a hopeful layout, and the small daily question of whether this one comes out. Some formats just get it right.