Patience games

Patience 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 112 of them, sorted into 9 families.

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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

Build four foundations from Ace up to King while keeping the tableau in descending, alternating-colour order. What splits the family is information: Klondike hides most of the deal and rations the rest through a stock, while FreeCell turns everything face-up and gives you a few cells to shuffle cards through instead.

Klondike — The patience everyone knows. Draw 1 or 3.
FreeCell — All cards visible. Use the four cells.
Yukon — Move face-up stacks regardless of order.

All 19 games in Downtown →

Old Town

The oldest shape in the genre. Cards are dealt into small fans, you build down in suit one card at a time, and when the position dries up you gather the whole tableau and redeal rather than drawing from a stock. Redeals are strictly limited, so a wasted one is usually the game.

La Belle Lucie — Eighteen fans, strict suit-down building.
Trefoil — La Belle Lucie with aces pre-extracted.
The Fan — No-redeal La Belle Lucie, kings fill empty fans.

All 5 games in Old Town →

The Heights

A reserve pile feeds the tableau, and the foundations start on whatever rank happened to turn up first rather than always on an Ace — which means the sequence wraps around from King back through Ace. Everything hangs on how fast you can drain the reserve.

Canfield — Compact reserve patience with wrap-around foundations.
Chameleon — Canfield variant: 3 columns, any-suit, no redeals.
Rainbow — Draw one, any-suit tableau, no redeals.

All 7 games in The Heights →

Pyramid Park

Geometry rather than foundations. The cards are laid in a shape that covers itself, and you dismantle it from the outside in: mostly by removing exposed pairs that add to thirteen, and in the peak games by taking cards one rank above or below the waste.

Pyramid — Pair cards summing to 13 to remove them.
Relaxed Pyramid — Clear only the pyramid; stock may remain.
Tut’s Tomb — Pyramid with a three-card stock draw cadence.

All 8 games in Pyramid Park →

The Web

There is nothing to build toward at first. You assemble descending same-suit runs inside the tableau itself, and a run that reaches from King down to Ace is lifted off the board whole. The Scorpion branch loosens this by letting you move any face-up stack regardless of the order it is in.

Spider — Build same-suit sequences to clear the board.
Relaxed Spider — Spider with relaxed redeal rule.
Spiderette — One-deck Spider with 7-column layout.

All 10 games in The Web →

The Bazaar

Matching instead of building. You clear the layout by discarding cards that pair to a target — thirteen, eleven, fourteen — or that simply match in rank. Rounds are short, most of the deal is visible, and the difficulty is noticing the pair you are about to bury.

Addition — Match pairs that total a target.
Baroness — Discard pairs summing to 13.
Good Thirteen — Pairs summing to 13 or lone Kings.

All 11 games in The Bazaar →

Grand Plaza

Two decks, eight foundations, and layouts big enough to need a plan before the first move. This is the largest family on the site and holds the longest games in it.

Crescent — Two-deck fan layout with shifting stacks.
Miss Milligan — Double-deck patience with a weave reserve.
Windmill — Center and corner foundations, windmill layout.

All 36 games in Grand Plaza →

Clocktower

Dials and cycles. The clock games deal into a ring and then largely play themselves out, so the question is whether the cycle resolves before it stalls rather than which move you pick — with one pure movement puzzle, Tower of Pisa, sitting alongside them.

Clock — Race the clock to uncover the kings last.
Perpetual Motion — Forced four-pile patience that may loop forever.
Tower of Pisa — Nine-card Hanoi puzzle, bottom-card movement.

All 3 games in Clocktower →

The Greenway

Open-air builders where the whole difficulty is placement. You deal into waste piles you control, fill holes in a grid, or run foundations up and down by fixed steps. Very little is hidden; the catch is that almost nothing can be taken back.

Golf — Play cards one above or below the waste top.
Carpet — Twenty open holes feeding four foundations.
Colorado — Two decks, 20 waste piles, build up and down.

All 13 games in The Greenway →

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.

All 112 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.