The History of Solitaire: From Patience to Windows

Solitaire has a strange résumé. It began as an aristocratic parlor diversion in 18th-century Europe, spent a century as the quiet companion of Victorian drawing rooms, and then — through an accident of software history — became what may be the most-played computer game of all time. The cards never changed. Everything around them did.

This is the story of how a game for one player conquered a billion desktops, told through its four great chapters: Patience, the Gold Rush, the White House, and Windows.

Northern Europe, late 1700s: the first solitaires

Nobody invented solitaire on a known date, but the paper trail starts in northern Europe in the late 18th century. The earliest written references appear in German and Scandinavian sources from the 1780s — a German gaming anthology published in 1783 describes Patiencespiel as a competitive game in which players took turns, or played separate decks side by side, racing to finish first. The solo version we know may actually have come second.

One popular theory ties those early layouts to cartomancy — fortune-telling with cards, which swept fashionable Europe in the same decades. The mechanics rhyme: lay the cards out in a pattern, and see whether they resolve. If the game "came out," the omen was good. Historians debate how literal the connection is, but the vocabulary of solitaire still carries the echo — players today talk about a deal being "meant to be won," which is fortune-telling in all but name.

What is certain is that the game spread the way fashions spread: through courts, salons, and the aristocratic families who moved between them. Legend even places a deck in the hands of Napoleon during his exile on Saint Helena — probably apocryphal, but the fact that the story stuck tells you who was playing.

The 19th century: Patience conquers Britain and France

By the mid-1800s the game had crossed to France and Britain and acquired the name it would keep for a century: Patience. The French called it réussite — "success" — which captures the same idea from the optimist's side.

Victorian Britain embraced it completely. Patience appears in the novels of the era as naturally as tea; Charles Dickens's world of drawing rooms and long evenings was exactly the habitat where a solo card game thrives. Playing cards were cheap, evenings were long, and Patience asked nothing of you but a table and a deck.

The era also produced the game's first literature. In 1870, Lady Adelaide Cadogan published Illustrated Games of Patience — widely considered the first collection of solitaire rules in English. It went through edition after edition, and it did something quietly important: it fixed the games in print. Before Cadogan, a "game of patience" was whatever your grandmother taught you. After her, games had names, standard layouts, and rules you could cite. Dozens of imitators followed, and by 1900 the family of recorded patience games numbered in the hundreds.

Somewhere in the Atlantic crossing, the game also picked up its American name. In Britain the game remained "Patience" well into the 20th century; in the United States, "solitaire" — from the French for solitary — won out. The split persists today: a London rulebook and a New York one may describe the identical game under different titles, one emphasizing the virtue the game demands, the other the solitude it fills.

Klondike and the Gold Rush

One of those hundreds would eat the rest. The game Americans simply call "solitaire" — seven columns, deal from the stock, build Aces up by suit — took its name from the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. The most repeated story says prospectors in the Yukon played it through the long subarctic winters, and some accounts describe gambling-hall versions where players bought a deck and were paid per card they managed to place on the foundations.

Whatever its exact route through the mining camps, the name stuck, and Klondike entered the 20th century as the default solitaire of the English-speaking world. It had the qualities a default needs: a fast deal, simple rules, and just enough losing to keep you dealing again.

Spider and the President

Spider is the young sibling. It emerges in print in the 1940s, a two-deck game named for the eight suit runs a winner must complete — one for each of a spider's eight legs. It was a connoisseur's game from the start: 104 cards, ten columns, and a shape closer to a long excavation than a quick deal.

Its most famous early devotee was Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose fondness for Spider was reported widely enough to become part of the game's lore. There is something fitting in a wartime president unwinding with the most demanding patience game in the book — Spider rewards exactly the kind of long-horizon planning that shorter solitaires never ask for.

On paper, though, Spider had a problem: shuffling and dealing two full decks by hand is genuinely tedious. It would take a machine to set Spider free.

1990: the mouse-training program that ate the workday

The machine arrived in 1990. Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 with a small card game titled simply Solitaire — Klondike, drawn in 16 colors. It was written by Wes Cherry, a summer intern, who was famously never paid for it beyond his internship. The card backs were designed by Susan Kare, the artist behind the original Macintosh icons.

Solitaire was not included as entertainment, at least not officially. Its stated purpose was to teach a generation of office workers to use a mouse — dragging a card from one pile to another is drag-and-drop, practiced until it feels natural. As training software it succeeded instantly. As entertainment it succeeded catastrophically: within a few years, surveys of office computing regularly found Solitaire among the most-used Windows programs of any kind, and managers were asking Microsoft how to remove it.

FreeCell and the 32,000 deals

Windows' second solitaire had deeper roots than most players guessed. FreeCell descends from a game Paul Alfille programmed in 1978 for PLATO, the pioneering university computer system — making it one of the oldest continuously played computer card games anywhere. Alfille's innovation was elegant: deal every card face up, add four free cells for temporary storage, and suddenly solitaire becomes a game of pure calculation instead of luck.

Jim Horne ported FreeCell to Microsoft, and it reached the masses with Windows 95, carrying its famous library of 32,000 numbered deals. Those numbers created something new in solitaire: a shared canon. Every player in the world could attempt the exact same deal, compare notes, and argue about it. An internet project eventually proved that every one of the original 32,000 deals is solvable except one — deal #11982, solitaire's most famous unwinnable hand.

Spider gets its turn

Spider joined the family in the Windows 98 Plus! pack, then reached everyone with Windows XP — where it sat one click from roughly a billion desktops. The computer had solved Spider's only real flaw: the machine shuffles 104 cards instantly and deals the ten columns without complaint. Freed from its paper-era tedium, the connoisseur's game found a mass audience, and for many XP-era players Spider simply became solitaire — the version we carry forward on this site's Spider tables.

By the 2000s, telemetry and usage studies pointed to a conclusion that would have astonished Lady Cadogan: the Windows solitaires, taken together, were plausibly the most-played computer games in history. Not the flashiest, not the most profitable — just quietly played, billions of hands, on more machines than any game before or since.

Today: the browser era

The current chapter belongs to the browser. Solitaire no longer ships in the box with the operating system — it lives at a URL, loads in a second, and runs on whatever device is in your hand. The classic trio survived the transition intact: Klondike for speed, FreeCell for logic, Spider for depth. If you want to see how differently the three think, our head-to-head comparison breaks down which game fits which player.

Two hundred and fifty years on, the game's appeal has barely moved: a shuffled deck, a known goal, and the open question of whether this particular deal will come out. The fortune-tellers of the 1780s would recognize it immediately.