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Solitaire, a game of patience

[Due to a variety of additional responsibilities that came my way during the past week, I am resorting to reprinting a column from my distant past. The following originally appeared in print on April 8, 1997.]

Recently, an episode of the comic strip “Foxtrot” had one of the characters commenting how strange it was to be playing “Solitaire” with an actual deck of cards rather than on a computer. Well, this got me thinking about this peculiar game which, with the advent of personal computers in the home, is arguably the single (pardon the pun) most played game in the United States.

By way of clarification, the game I am referring to involves seven piles of cards with an increasing number of cards in each pile from (one to seven) left to right. The top card of each pile is turned over and the object of the game is to get all of the cards of each suit in order, from ace to king, at the top of the board. Those cards not dealt into the seven piles are turned either one or three at a time and are played on the piles.

Now that we are on the same wavelength, the first thing I should tell you is that this game is NOT called solitaire. Actually, the term solitaire, is used these days to refer to almost all card games for one player. Originally, however, the collective name for these games was “Patience,” and, just as today’s term of solitaire has come to refer to the game I outlined above, the term “patience” became the popular name of this same game. The simple reason for this is that this odd game has always been the most widely played of the solitaire or patience games.

Of course, at the outset, everyone seemed to have their own name for the game. The French, for example, called the game reussite, which means “success” or “favorable outcome.” An early source refers to reussite as being, “a combination of cards by which superstitious persons try…to divine the success of an undertaking, a vow, etc.” This idea of fortune-telling is reinforced when you consider that the name of the game in Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic is kabal or kabale which means “secret knowledge.” In fact, the earliest description of Patience occurs within a few years of the invention of layout patterns for fortune-telling (tarot and the like) in 1765 [NOTE: Of added interest is that this first reliable reference to fortune-telling with cards is in Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie].

Despite the French origin of the name, authorities generally agree that the origin of the game of Patience is probably either German or Scandinavian. The oldest known book of Patience games was printed in Moscow in 1826, but at least six other collections were published in Sweden before 1850 (three before 1840) which leads (in conjunction with other facts and circumstantial evidence) historians to conclude that the game(s) probably originated in Sweden.

Patience did not arrive, or at least become popular, in Great Britain until the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the novel Great Expectations, published in 1861, Dickens has the character of Magwitch playing “a complicated game kind of Patience with a ragged pack of cards.” The first known guide to the games in English was published sometime around this same era, titled Illustrated Games of Patience, by Lady Adolaide Cadogan [NOTE: The reason I hedge on the date is simply that no one knows for sure. A second edition of the book by the same author was published in 1874, but a first edition was lost, presumably in the wartime fire at the British Museum library].

Ultimately, the British named the game of Patience I outlined at the beginning of this column either “Klondike,” or “Cavendish,” the latter being considered the more traditional of the two appellations.

So now we skip back to that original “Foxtrot” comic strip and the musings which struck me after I read it. Obviously, I began to wonder about the origins of the game, which led to some research and all of the above information. Initially, though, I began to speculate about some poor misguided schmuck, wasting away hour after hour devising what is, after all, a frivolous game. So, presuming the historians are correct, and the game did originate in Sweden, a scenario like the following might actually have happened:

Ole: Hilda, come qvickly, I’ve finally done it! Vatch dis! [Quickly deals out and plays the very first game of Patience for his wife]

Hilda: Dat’s it? You verk every night, all night and dat’s it?

Ole: Da…it’s dat simple. Soon everyone vill be playing dis game and ve vill be rich!

Hilda: YOU IDIOT! Everyone who has cards or can make cards vill simply play da game. No vun vill pay you anyting. Nine years you come home from fishing in the fjords and sit on your fat vear end vit your cards for vhut? FOR VHUT I ask you? I tell you for vhut…FOR NUT-TING. It’s a stupid game invented by an IDIOT vhich no one vill ever play. And even if they do, ve vill never make even one krona from!

Ole: Oh. (Long Pause) Vant to play a game?

According to someone named “Captain Crawley” in The Card Players Manual, published in 1876: “Games for one player are childish and simple, and not worth learning. When a man is reduced to such a pass as playing cards by himself, he had better give up…” The good “Captain’s” isn’t the only admonition about playing by one’s self. I have also heard, somewhere, that it can cause blindness, though I’m not absolutely certain that this was in reference to Cavendish, Klondike, Patience, Solitaire, or whatever you may call the game.