Solitaire is the most-played card game on Earth, yet almost nobody plays it against another person. It has been installed on billions of devices, blamed for untold hours of lost office productivity, and credited with teaching an entire generation how to use a mouse. But before it was software, solitaire was a fashionable European pastime with a whiff of fortune-telling about it - And its story stretches back more than two centuries.

The Baltic Origins: Late 1700s

The earliest written records of solitaire - Or patience, as it is still called in Britain and much of Europe - Appear in the late eighteenth century in the Baltic region of northern Europe. A German gaming anthology published in 1788, Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel, contains one of the first known descriptions of a patience game, and references from the same era crop up in Germany and Scandinavia.

Curiously, some of these early accounts describe patience being played competitively - Two players racing side by side with their own decks, or taking turns and comparing results. The purely solitary version we know today seems to have grown out of that social game rather than the other way around. There is also a persistent theory that patience began as a form of cartomancy: laying out cards and seeing whether the "puzzle" resolved was read as an omen, with a won game auguring well. The line between telling your fortune and passing the time was, apparently, thin.

Patience Sweeps the Parlors of Europe

Through the first half of the nineteenth century the game spread west into France and Britain. French players and writers left a lasting fingerprint on its vocabulary - Terms like tableau (the main layout) and talon (the stock) are French, and many classic variants still carry French names.

The first books devoted entirely to patience appeared in the 1850s and 1860s. Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience (published around 1870) became the standard English-language reference and ran through edition after edition. By the end of the century, patience collections were a publishing staple, and the game had genuinely famous fans: Charles Dickens gave a patience habit to a character in Great Expectations, and Leo Tolstoy both played the game and wrote it into his fiction.

The Napoleon Legend

No history of solitaire skips Napoleon Bonaparte - So let's give the legend its due, and its caveat. The story goes that Napoleon whiled away his exile on Saint Helena (1815–1821) playing patience, and several variants, including Napoleon at Saint Helena (better known today as Forty Thieves), are named for him. Contemporary accounts of his exile do mention him playing cards, but they name games like whist and piquet, not patience. Most historians suspect the solitaire connection was a bit of nineteenth-century marketing: naming a game after the century's most famous prisoner was simply good business. The names stuck anyway.

Klondike and the Gold Rush

The variant most people now simply call "solitaire" - Seven tableau columns, alternating red and black, foundations built Ace to King - Is properly called Klondike. Its name points to the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s in the Canadian Yukon, and the game is widely believed to have been popular among prospectors, though (as with much solitaire history) hard documentation is scarce. The rules were being printed in American game books by the early twentieth century, sometimes under the name "Canfield" - Which brings us to one of the game's best stories.

Richard Canfield's Casino Game

In the 1890s, Richard A. Canfield ran a famously upscale gambling house in Saratoga Springs, New York. Among his offerings was a solitaire wager: a player bought a deck for $50 and received $5 back for every card moved to the foundations, with a big payout for finishing the whole deck. Players averaged only around five or six cards per game, so the house did very nicely. The game Canfield actually dealt is the one still called Canfield today - A thirteen-card reserve, foundations that start from a random base rank - But in a lasting act of confusion, American writers spent decades using "Canfield" as a name for Klondike too. If your grandmother calls Klondike "Canfield," she's in good historical company.

1990: Microsoft Solitaire Changes Everything

For its first two hundred years, solitaire required a physical deck and a table. Then came Windows 3.0.

In 1988, a Microsoft summer intern named Wes Cherry wrote a Klondike game for Windows, mostly to teach himself programming. Microsoft shipped it with Windows 3.0 in 1990 - Not as a toy, but with a pedagogical mission: at a time when most people had never used a mouse, solitaire taught the drag-and-drop gesture in the least intimidating way imaginable. Cherry famously received no royalties for what became one of the most-used programs in history. (The elegant card faces were designed by Susan Kare, the artist behind the original Macintosh icons.)

The result was arguably the most successful software launch of all time by hours played. Microsoft Solitaire shipped on hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of PCs. It became such a fixture of office life that it generated genuine controversy - In 2006, New York City's mayor fired a city employee after spotting solitaire on his screen. Microsoft has said the game was among the most-used Windows applications for years, and its descendant, the Microsoft Solitaire Collection, was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019.

FreeCell and the Windows Family

Klondike wasn't the only beneficiary of the Windows era. FreeCell - A nearly-always-winnable variant played with every card face up - Had been implemented by Paul Alfille on the PLATO computer system back in 1978. Jim Horne brought it to Windows, and after shipping with a software pack in 1992 it reached everyone with Windows 95. FreeCell developed a famously obsessive fan culture: its 32,000 numbered deals were attacked by a coordinated "FreeCell Project" of players determined to solve them all, and exactly one deal - #11982 - Was found to be unwinnable. Spider Solitaire joined the Windows lineup in 1998 and became a favorite in its own right; you can play it here.

The Mobile Era: Solitaire in Your Pocket

When smartphones arrived, solitaire made the jump instantly - The game's one-more-deal rhythm and single-finger controls made it a perfect fit for a phone screen. Solitaire apps have sat near the top of app-store card game charts for as long as the stores have existed, played by tens of millions of people daily. The demographics might surprise you: surveys of mobile solitaire players consistently skew older and more female than gaming stereotypes suggest, and many players report using the game the way earlier generations used it - As a small, calming ritual rather than a competition.

The browser era added something the parlor game never had: features. Modern web solitaire offers unlimited undo, hints, statistics, seeded daily deals, and even head-to-head races. What began as a solitary meditation now has leaderboards.

A Timeline at a Glance

  • 1788 - First known written description of a patience game, in a German games anthology.
  • c. 1870 - Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience codifies dozens of variants for English readers.
  • 1890s - Richard Canfield's Saratoga casino turns solitaire into a wager; the Klondike Gold Rush lends the classic game its name.
  • 1978 - Paul Alfille implements FreeCell on the PLATO system.
  • 1990 - Wes Cherry's Solitaire ships with Windows 3.0 and teaches the world to drag and drop.
  • 1995–1998 - FreeCell and Spider Solitaire reach every Windows desktop.
  • 2010s–today - Solitaire becomes a daily mobile and browser habit for tens of millions, complete with daily challenges and multiplayer.

Why Solitaire Endures

Two hundred and thirty-odd years is a long run for any game, and solitaire's secret is that it scratches several itches at once. Each deal is a small self-contained puzzle with a beginning, middle, and end. The mix of luck and skill is forgiving - A loss is never entirely your fault, and a win always feels at least partly earned. And it demands just enough attention to crowd out everything else, which is why so many players describe it as meditative rather than competitive.

The technology keeps changing - Parlor table, office PC, phone, browser - But the game underneath is the same one described in that 1788 German anthology: lay out the cards, and see if patience can untangle them. If you'd like to add your own chapter to the history, the classic game is waiting on our Klondike table, and today's seeded deal is up in the Daily Challenge.