The History of Solitaire

Solitaire is an eighteenth-century invention. The earliest documented references to single-player card games as a distinct genre come from Northern Europe — Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltic states, and the part of France closest to those traditions — in the final quarter of the 1700s. The word used for them was "patience" in English, French, and German, and the word captured the essence: these were games of quiet perseverance, played alone, often while waiting. The earliest surviving primary sources are German and French card-game anthologies from the 1780s and 1790s that describe patiences alongside two-player and party card games.

The games described in those early anthologies are recognizably solitaire. Some used a stock, some used a tableau, and a few used the circular dealing arrangement that would later become Clock Solitaire. The vocabulary was not yet standardized — what one book called a "patience," another called a "reussi" (success) or a "reussite." English-language publishers adopted the word "patience" in the early 1800s and kept it until the American preference for "solitaire" eclipsed it in the late twentieth century. Both words are still in use, with patience dominant in British and European writing and solitaire dominant in American writing.

What is important about the late-1700s origin is that solitaire was born as a leisure activity for the reading class. Card-game anthologies were expensive, literacy was required to learn new patiences, and the context was primarily domestic. That context shaped the genre: no time limits, no scoring obligations, no social stakes, and a strong emphasis on rule variation. Every patience collection added new games invented by its author.

The standard modern playing card deck made solitaire possible in its current form. The fifty-two-card French deck (four suits, numbered Ace through King) had stabilized across Europe by the middle of the 1700s, and patience games depend on that standardization. Earlier regional decks (the German suits, the Italian-Spanish suits, the Tarot deck) had been used for various single-player card activities, but the form we recognize today is French-deck native. A handful of early German patiences survive that used non-French decks, but those games did not travel into the English-language tradition.

It is worth noting what solitaire was not, originally. It was not a gambling game (with the important exception of Canfield, which arrived a century later). It was not a divination tool in any mainstream sense, though a thin strand of "fortune telling with cards" overlapped with patience in the Victorian era. It was not a children’s game. Solitaire in its first hundred years was an adult domestic pastime, and the slow rhythm of the genre reflects that lineage.

A persistent story claims that Napoleon Bonaparte played patience during his exile on St Helena (1815-1821), and that several solitaires bear his name for that reason. The story appears constantly in popular writing about solitaire, and several modern variants still carry Napoleonic names: Napoleon’s Square, Napoleon at St Helena (a traditional alternate name for Forty Thieves), and several others. It is one of the most widely repeated claims in the canon.

The primary sources are more ambiguous. The memoirs of Las Cases, Bertrand, and Montholon — Napoleon’s companions on St Helena — describe a great deal of how Napoleon spent his time, but direct, unambiguous descriptions of him playing patience are thin. The strongest surviving references are indirect or retrospective, written after Napoleon’s death, and several appear to be embellishments added by nineteenth-century card-game publishers to sell patience anthologies. It is plausible that Napoleon played patience; it is also plausible that publishers leaned on a half-remembered anecdote to brand their products.

The History Desk’s position: the Napoleonic patience legend has a thin factual basis and a thick promotional history. We do not repeat it as fact. We note that several variants carry Napoleonic names because of this legend, which is itself historically interesting, but we do not claim Napoleon was personally the origin of any of them.

The useful thing about the Napoleon legend is what it tells us about the nineteenth-century card-game market. Publishers needed names, angles, and associations that would move books. An exiled emperor playing cards on a remote island was an irresistible hook. Similar branding efforts are everywhere in the patience canon: games named for queens, cathedrals, cities, and historical events that had nothing to do with their actual origin. A game called Napoleon’s Square was more memorable than a game called Square Patience, and that memorability had real commercial value.

The Victorian era is when patience became a mass cultural artifact. Lady Adelaide Cadogan published her influential patience anthologies in the 1870s, and she is the single most important figure in the English-language patience tradition. Her collections codified rules for dozens of games, established naming conventions that persist today, and introduced a standard format (rules, illustrative layout, notes on variations) that every subsequent patience anthology imitated.

Cadogan was not working in a vacuum. Parallel traditions emerged in France (where the patience anthology was already mature), Germany (where several collections appeared in the 1860s and 1870s), and Russia (where patience became a parlor staple in aristocratic households). English writers borrowed freely from French collections, French writers borrowed from German ones, and Russian writers combined both. The result was a shared canon with regional variants, similar to the way card games like poker and whist developed.

The Victorian era also established patience as a female-coded activity, which it had not been before. The earlier eighteenth-century context was mixed-gender domestic leisure. By the end of the nineteenth century, patience was associated with women, often older women, and often played while waiting or while convalescing. That gender-coding persists. Solitaire audiences today skew roughly sixty percent female, with the largest single demographic segment being players over sixty-five.

Cadogan’s specific contribution to the canon is hard to overstate. Her rule sets were the templates later writers copied (often without attribution), and several games in the modern canon survive only because she recorded them. La Belle Lucie, Flower Garden, and a handful of other French patiences entered the English-speaking canon through Cadogan’s collections. Her editorial decisions — which games to include, which rule variants to prefer, which names to use — shaped the patience canon for a century.

In the United States, patience games traveled a different path. The late nineteenth century brought Hoyle’s authoritative rule books into American homes, and Hoyle included patience alongside whist, poker, and euchre. Patience became a recognized category in American card-game literature, though it remained a minor one relative to the two-player games that dominated the Gilded Age.

American naming conventions departed from the English and French traditions in interesting ways. When the single-player game we now call Klondike became popular in American households (likely in the late 1890s), it took its name from the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1899), which dominated American popular culture at the time. Canfield solitaire was named for Richard Canfield, the New York casino owner who ran a version of the game as a gambling attraction around the turn of the century — players paid $52 for a deck and earned $5 per card moved to the foundations. Demon, Streets and Alleys, and other American variants all took their names from the cultural moments of their era.

American patience absorbed new games more quickly than the European tradition because it had less deference to established anthologies. If a game was fun and spread, it became canon. This is the mechanism by which Klondike, a latecomer to the canon, became the single most popular patience in the world.

American patience anthologies of the early twentieth century are fascinating documents. Many were published cheaply and sold through department stores as inexpensive gift items. Others were tied to the emerging card-game clubs in major cities, which combined bridge night, whist, and patience into a single social institution. The anthology by Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith, revised repeatedly through the middle of the century, became the standard American reference until digital solitaire eclipsed print.

Two twentieth-century games transformed the canon. The first is FreeCell. Paul Alfille, a medical student at the University of Illinois, wrote the first digital FreeCell for the PLATO educational computing system around 1978. Alfille’s version was based on an older paper patience called Eight Off, modified to use four free cells instead of eight and adapted for the PLATO display. FreeCell was an obscure game for more than a decade after Alfille coded it, played almost exclusively by PLATO users.

FreeCell’s global explosion came in 1991 when Jim Horne, a Microsoft engineer, ported the game to Windows as a demonstration of 32-bit processing for Windows for Workgroups. Horne’s port shipped with Microsoft products, and by the mid-1990s FreeCell was installed on tens of millions of PCs. It was Jim Horne’s version that introduced the famous 32,000 numbered deals, the solvability research that followed, and the now-legendary unwinnable deals (most notably deal 11982).

Horne’s port is a particularly clean example of inside-company software becoming outside-company culture. FreeCell was originally intended as a pack-in with the Windows 32-bit Development Kit, not as a mass-market game. When it arrived in Microsoft Plus! in 1995, it became a household game almost by accident. The deal-numbering system (games 1 through 32,000, each derived deterministically from its number) also arrived with Horne’s port, and it is now the standard addressing scheme for FreeCell deals across every implementation on the internet.

Spider Solitaire’s origins are murkier. The game is old enough to appear in twentieth-century patience anthologies, and its mechanics (two decks, same-suit King-to-Ace sequences) fit the early-twentieth-century American expansion pattern. Spider was not widely played outside specialist patience circles until Microsoft shipped it with Windows ME in 2000, which is when Spider entered the mainstream. The Microsoft version was the one that popularized the 1-suit / 2-suit / 4-suit difficulty dial; earlier paper Spiders typically used only the four-suit form.

The academic interest in FreeCell that followed Horne’s port was unprecedented. Mathematicians at Berkeley and elsewhere worked through the Microsoft 32,000 catalog in the mid-1990s, publishing solvability data that became the foundation of modern solitaire research. The finding that exactly eight of the first 32,000 Microsoft deals are unwinnable (with 11982 being the most famous) is the product of that era of academic work. No patience game had ever been studied at that depth before, and the techniques developed for FreeCell solver research later fed into solvers for Klondike and Spider.

Microsoft Solitaire shipped with Windows 3.0 in May 1990. The implementation was written by Wes Cherry, an intern at Microsoft, and the card artwork was designed by Susan Kare, the designer behind much of Apple’s early Mac interface iconography. The game was intended partly as a mouse-training tool: Windows 3.0 users had to learn to drag, drop, and right-click, and Solitaire gave them a reason to practice. The strategic choice to include a playable game with the operating system had consequences Microsoft did not foresee.

Windows Solitaire became one of the most-played computer games in history. By conservative estimates, billions of hands of Klondike have been played on Microsoft desktops since 1990. The game reshaped the meaning of the word "solitaire" in English — for a generation of players, "solitaire" meant specifically Klondike draw-3 as Windows shipped it. The game also generated research interest in productivity impact, particularly in the corporate IT literature of the mid-1990s, though most of that research was anecdotal.

Microsoft added FreeCell to Windows 95 via the Microsoft Plus! pack, then bundled it into Windows 95 OSR2 and all subsequent versions. Spider arrived with Windows ME in 2000. Microsoft consolidated these games into Microsoft Solitaire Collection for Windows 8, which added daily challenges, achievements, and a shared UI. For many players, the Microsoft Solitaire Collection is still the reference implementation — a status we see reflected in our own search traffic. See our Microsoft FreeCell history page for a deeper look at the FreeCell portion of this era.

Wes Cherry’s version of the game is still used as a reference point for Klondike rules in serious solitaire circles. The quirks of the original (specific scoring, the Vegas scoring variant, the way auto-move behaved) were all authored decisions that became the de facto standard for digital Klondike.

Susan Kare’s card design deserves its own mention. Kare was hired to design the card faces for Microsoft Solitaire after her work on the original Macintosh interface. Her cards prioritized readability at small sizes and high contrast, two constraints that mattered enormously on the low-resolution displays of the early 1990s. Later redesigns of the Windows cards (most notably the mid-1990s update that introduced the flying-cards win animation, and later the Windows XP card redesign) all started from Kare’s original as a reference. Card design is one of the invisible design disciplines; Kare’s cards were seen billions of times and almost never consciously noticed.

The "productivity impact of Solitaire" literature from the 1990s is more cultural than empirical. Management consultants and IT journalists wrote about Solitaire as a workplace problem, estimating lost productivity in billions of dollars. Most of those estimates were speculative. What is documentable is that Microsoft removed the Solitaire and Minesweeper icons from Windows Vista’s default Start menu placement partly in response to this discourse, and that in 2012, Microsoft Solitaire Collection moved to a freemium model with ads. That was a shift in business model as much as in cultural framing.

The transition from desktop to browser began in the late 1990s with Flash-based implementations and accelerated with HTML5 in the early 2010s. The first generation of browser solitaire was often Klondike, styled to look like the Windows version. The second generation (roughly 2010 onward) expanded the catalog to include FreeCell, Spider, TriPeaks, Pyramid, and the broader canon. The current generation runs in the browser, installs as a progressive web app on mobile, and ships daily-challenge infrastructure by default.

Modern mobile apps added two new features: the daily challenge (a single deal shared by every player that day) and the streak (consecutive days of play). Both features turned solitaire from a pastime into a habit-builder, which had profound effects on engagement and retention. The solitaire category today is driven by free-to-play mobile apps that borrow heavily from mobile game design, while the browser category serves players who prefer a lighter, ad-supported experience.

The economic shape of the category shifted dramatically in the 2010s. Solitaire apps became free-to-play with advertising rather than paid downloads, monetization moved to display ads and occasionally to rewarded video, and the largest solitaire publishers became ad-tech companies first and game developers second. This commercial shift drove design decisions around daily challenges, achievements, in-app currencies, and streak rewards that earlier desktop solitaire did not have. Whether these features add to the game or distract from it is a matter of taste; either way they are now standard.

Solver research has quietly reshaped the canon in the internet age. Researchers have analyzed nearly every FreeCell deal (finding the handful of unwinnable ones), quantified Klondike’s ceiling win rate, and published win-rate distributions for Spider across suit counts. This research is why we can publish confident figures on our difficulty ranking and our probability pages. Pre-solver era solitaire writing often assigned win rates by intuition; post-solver era writing cites data.

The modern browser solitaire stack is also worth placing in historical context. Early browser solitaires were Flash-based and tended to imitate the Windows look faithfully. The HTML5 transition around 2012 freed designers to rethink the presentation, and newer sites have embraced darker themes, larger cards, keyboard navigation, and accessibility features that were previously absent. Our own network runs on HTML5 Canvas and DOM-based implementations, with a push toward DOM-based rendering because it handles accessibility more gracefully than Canvas.

The smartphone era added touch interfaces to solitaire, which sounds trivial but changed the interaction model significantly. Mouse-based Klondike invites deliberate dragging; touch-based Klondike invites rapid-tap auto-routing. The cultural expectation of speed shifted accordingly. Players coming up on touch solitaire in the 2010s and 2020s tend to play faster, tolerate restarts more easily, and expect a daily-challenge loop that earlier desktop players never had. The game is the same; the experience is different.

The History Desk works primarily from primary and well-established secondary sources. The references below are the ones we consult most often when working on solitaire history. This is a starting point, not an exhaustive bibliography.

• David Parlett, The Oxford Guide to Card Games (1990) — the standard reference for card-game history, including a substantial section on patience. Parlett is careful about sourcing and is our preferred starting point for any historical question.
• Lady Adelaide Cadogan, Illustrated Games of Patience (1870) — the Victorian anthology that codified rules for a large portion of the English patience canon. Cadogan’s rules are the direct ancestors of modern published rule sets for many variants.
• Dick’s Games of Patience (late 1800s) — an American Victorian-era patience anthology that captured the games popular in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.
• Pagat.com — a modern online reference for card-game rules maintained by John McLeod. Careful, well-sourced, and useful for cross-checking rule claims across regional traditions.
• Wikipedia — useful as a secondary source and jumping-off point, but we verify against primary sources before repeating claims from Wikipedia articles.
• Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith, The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games (multiple editions, mid-twentieth century) — the standard American patience reference of its era. Still widely cited for rule variants and for the history of several games popularized in the United States.
• Primary newspaper and magazine archives — for the Microsoft Solitaire era (1990 onward), contemporary reporting in trade publications, tech journalism, and business press provides a useful cross-check on corporate narratives about Solitaire.

We keep a running list of the specific claims on this page that rest on thin evidence and we flag them in the body where relevant. If you find a primary source that changes one of those claims, write to the History Desk and we will revise.