Patience gamesPatience games, explained.
Patience is the older, British name for the card games North America calls solitaire: one player, a shuffled deck, and a layout that either comes out or does not. The name is the only real difference — a game of patience and a game of solitaire are the same thing. Solitaire.City documents 214 of them, sorted into 19 families.
Patience or solitaire?
Both words describe the same genre. Patience is standard in Britain and across much of Europe; solitaire is standard in North America. French players call them réussites; German keeps Patience.
The useful difference is what each word points at. British usage keeps “patience” for the whole genre and names the individual game — Klondike, Demon, Miss Milligan. American usage often collapses “solitaire” down to one specific game, Klondike, because that is the one nearly everybody met first on a computer.
One genuine ambiguity worth knowing: in Britain, “solitaire” can also mean the peg board game played with marbles, which has nothing to do with cards.
Where patience games came from
The games are younger than the deck they use. Patience is first recorded in northern Europe in the late eighteenth century, with the earliest known printed collections usually dated to the 1780s, in German and Scandinavian sources.
The story that Napoleon passed his exile playing patience is a legend rather than a record — there is no contemporary evidence for it, though the games named after him stuck anyway, including Napoleon at St Helena.
English-language collections arrive in the 1870s, with Lady Adelaide Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience usually credited as the first. Much of the modern family vocabulary comes from David Parlett’s Penguin Book of Patience (1979).
Then in 1990 Microsoft bundled Klondike with Windows 3.0 under the name Solitaire, and for a generation of players that one game became what the word meant. It is still the best place to start.
Downtown · Klondike family
Build the tableau down in alternating colours, expose hidden cards as you go, and feed the four foundations from Ace up to King. The stock rations the rest of the deck. The variants change one thing at a time: Yukon lets you move any face-up stack, Australian Patience builds in suit, Easthaven and Agnes deal whole rows instead of drawing, and Whitehead turns everything face-up.
All 14 games in Downtown →
The Observatory · FreeCell & open packers
Perfect information, limited working space. FreeCell gives you four cells and alternating-colour builds; Penguin and Seahaven Towers tighten that to same-suit builds with fewer cells. Baker’s Dozen and King Albert take the cells away entirely, so every column you empty is the only breathing room you get.
All 14 games in The Observatory →
The Ramparts · Castle games
Beleaguered Castle starts its foundations with Aces. Citadel builds cards to them during the deal, Fortress gives ten two-way suit rows, and Streets and Alleys leaves the Aces shuffled into the columns. Castle of Indolence adds a second deck and four deep reserves.
All 6 games in The Ramparts →
The Web · Spider & Scorpion
Spider deals ten columns from two decks and drops a new row onto every column whenever you run out of moves, so empty columns and clean suit runs are everything. Spiderette and Will o’ the Wisp shrink it to one deck; Simple Simon and Mrs. Mop deal everything face-up. Rouge et Noir adds colour foundations to the same row-dealing engine. The Scorpion branch lets you move any face-up stack regardless of order, which trades hidden information for tangled columns.
All 12 games in The Web →
The Heights · Canfield family
Everything hangs on draining the reserve. The tableau is only three to five columns, so most cards route through the stock, the waste and the reserve rather than the board. The base rank is dealt at random (or chosen, in Selective Canfield), and the foundations wrap around it. Eagle’s Wing keeps the trunk reserve with a winged tableau, and Queen of Italy (Terrace) stretches the same reserve-plus-chosen-base idea across two decks.
All 15 games in The Heights →
Old Town · Fans (La Belle Lucie)
Build down in suit one card at a time, and when the position runs dry gather every fan and deal again rather than drawing. Redeals are strictly limited, so the whole game is about what you leave on the table before you shuffle. Trefoil starts with the Aces out, The Fan removes the redeal, and Crescent stretches the idea across two decks.
All 11 games in Old Town →
Pyramid Park · Pyramid & peaks
Geometry instead of foundations. You dismantle the shape from the outside in, pairing exposed cards that sum to thirteen, with a stock and waste to supply partners. The variants change the stock cadence (Tut’s Tomb), add waste piles (Apophis), remove the stock altogether (Giza) or invert the shape (Triangle).
All 6 games in Pyramid Park →
The Bazaar · Pairing & removal
Matching instead of building. Baroness, Good Thirteen and Fourteen Out pair to a sum; Elevens, Eight Cards and Gay Gordons add court-card pairs; Nestor and its variants match rank for rank. Rounds are short, nearly everything is visible, and the difficulty is noticing which pair you are about to bury.
All 13 games in The Bazaar →
Grand Plaza · Forty Thieves & two-deck builders
The big classical builders. Forty Thieves (Napoleon at St Helena) builds down in suit one card at a time and gives you a single pass through the stock, which makes it one of the hardest games on the site. Its relatives loosen a rule each: Emperor and Diplomat relax the building, Congress and Parliament refill empty columns from the waste, and Napoleon’s Square lets same-suit runs move together.
All 21 games in Grand Plaza →
The Parade Ground · Miss Milligan & row dealers
Miss Milligan deals one open card to each column and adds a temporary waive reserve after the stock. Millie removes that reserve, Giant and Imperial Guards relax empty-column rules, and the Cell, Harp and Yukon relatives change how cards start or move.
All 8 games in The Parade Ground →
The Vault · Reserve builders
Progress is gated by a reserve rather than by tableau building. Sultan surrounds a King with foundations, Royal Cotillion and Carpet deal a grid you refill, Backbone and Archway pile the reserve into a shape you dig through, and Tournament gives you reserve slots instead of a working tableau. Queen’s Audience retires royal pairs from a sixteen-card antechamber, and Leoni’s Own and Weavers cycle the stock through a rank-numbered loom. Most are two-deck games that reward planning the order you free the reserve in.
All 24 games in The Vault →
The Palace · Court games
Salic Law strips the Queens and deals everything onto eight Kings, then builds Ace-to-Jack foundations regardless of suit. Intrigue, Laggard Lady and Glencoe put Queens in charge and split the foundations into descending Five-piles and ascending Six-piles. Small family, distinctive rules: nothing else on the site starts its foundations mid-deck.
All 4 games in The Palace →
Clocktower · Layout, cross & clock-face games
Position dictates the rule. Windmill and Big Ben arrange foundations in a cross or a clock, Braid and British Square use a plait and a square, and Royal Parade and Virginia Reel turn the tableau into a grid of foundations stepping by threes.
All 24 games in Clocktower →
The Tileworks · Grid & sequence puzzles
Gaps and Double Montana fill holes with the next card in suit; Maze connects all rows into a loop. Poker Squares scores lines in a five-by-five grid, while Ninety-One challenges you to expose pile tops with a target total.
All 7 games in The Tileworks →
The Greenway · Waste-pile builders
Sir Tommy is the root: four waste piles, foundations built Ace to King regardless of suit, and no way back once a card is placed. Lady Betty and Colours add suit and colour rules, Calculation builds the foundations by different intervals, Colorado spreads twenty waste piles across two decks, and Birthday and Rosamund’s Bower deal to a discard with wrapping foundations.
All 14 games in The Greenway →
The Fairway · Golf & adjacency
Golf lays out seven columns and asks for the longest chain of adjacent ranks you can find; Tri Peaks does the same across three overlapping peaks with wraparound; Black Hole deals everything face-up around one foundation and lets ranks wrap in both directions.
All 5 games in The Fairway →
The Arcade · Mechanical & puzzle games
Clock and Royal Flush play out by themselves once dealt, Perpetual Motion may loop forever, and Tower of Pisa is a Tower of Hanoi puzzle in card form. They are here for the ritual, not the decisions.
All 7 games in The Arcade →
The Labyrinth · Blockade games
Labyrinth begins with four Ace foundations and refills gaps in its first row. Babette uses two decks, eight foundations and one redeal. Cicely combines a reserve with eight columns that accept same-suit descending builds between row deals.
All 3 games in The Labyrinth →
The Clockworks · Rank shuttles
Travellers, The Clock, Four of a Kind, Hidden Cards and Hide and Seek reorder a deck by rank with different layouts and starting points. Spoilt uses a smaller 32-card pack and gives each card a place by suit and rank.
All 6 games in The Clockworks →
Which one should you play?
If you have played any solitaire before, it was almost certainly Klondike, and the rest of Downtown will feel immediately familiar. If you want to think rather than draw, FreeCell and the open-information games put the whole deal in front of you. If you have ten minutes, The Bazaar and Pyramid Park finish quickly.
The two-deck games in Grand Plaza are the other end of the range: long layouts, eight foundations, and enough moving parts that a bad opening is hard to recover from. They reward planning more than speed.
Read more
- All 214 games — the full catalogue, grouped by how each game feels to play.
- Rules guide — foundations, tableau, stock and waste, and how variants change them.
- Glossary — plain definitions for tableau, reserve, redeal, and the rest of the vocabulary used above.
- Strategy index — how to actually win more of them.
- Solitaire games guide — the same catalogue approached by play style and difficulty.