Clock Patience

The chain

How to play Clock Patience

The deck is dealt into thirteen face-down piles of four: twelve arranged like the hours of a clock, and one in the middle. Nothing is visible, and nothing needs to be — the layout is the same every single time.

Turn the top card of the middle pile. Whatever it is, it goes under the pile named by its rank: a 9 to 9 o'clock, an ace to 1 o'clock, a queen to 12. Then turn the top card of that pile, and repeat. Each card you reveal tells you where to go next, so the game runs as one unbroken chain hopping around the dial.

Kings are the exception, and the reason there is a game here at all. A king has no hour, so it goes to the middle and the chain restarts from the centre. The middle pile holds four cards, so it can absorb exactly four visits. The fourth king is therefore the last card the centre can ever supply.

One move, two traps

The only move you ever have

Just one move is ever available, which makes this table short. It is here because the two illegal rows are the mistakes new players actually make.

The ending

Why the fourth king stops everything

Every king sends the chain back to the centre, and the centre has four cards. The first three kings are survivable: each one uses up a centre card but leaves at least one behind, so the chain can continue. The fourth king takes the last of them.

At that moment one of two things is true. Either all 52 cards are already face up, in which case the deal is complete and you have won — the fourth king is not a loss in itself, which surprises a lot of people. Or some pile still holds a face-down card, and there is now no card left to turn. The chain has nowhere to go and the deal is over.

This is why Clock Patience has no comeback mechanic. There is no stock to recycle, no alternative pile to try, and nothing you could have done differently. The shuffle decided the outcome before you turned the first card.

Skill, honestly

What you can and cannot control

Most solitaire guides have a strategy section. This one cannot, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Once a card is turned, its destination is forced, and the order of the hidden cards was fixed by the shuffle. No sequence of choices exists to be made well or badly.

What is left is mechanical, and it is worth getting right on a phone. Eleven and twelve o'clock sit close together at the top of the dial, and it is easy to tap the wrong one or to tap the pile the card came from out of habit. If you do, the game keeps the same card active so you can pick the correct pile straight away — a misplaced tap costs nothing.

Undo is here for reviewing rather than rescuing. It can take back a placement so you can look at the position again, but it cannot change what is under the face-down cards. Restart replays the identical chain; only New game reshuffles.

Same game, other names

Clock Solitaire, Circle, Watch, and German Clock

Clock-themed patience names overlap badly, and one of them is a completely different game. This is the only part of Clock Patience worth being careful about.

The game collects names. Clock Solitaire, Circle Solitaire, Sundial and Watch all describe this same dial and the same fourth-king ending, so if you arrived looking for one of those, you have found it.

If you want decisions

What to play when the coin flip wears thin

Clock Patience is a good thirty seconds and a poor hour. If the forced moves start to grate, the fix is a game with the same low overhead and real choices in it. Accordion keeps the compact one-deck feel and gives you a genuine decision on almost every turn. Pyramid keeps the simple card values but asks which exposed pair to clear.

For something quick but properly tactical, Aces Up and Golf both finish in a couple of minutes and both punish a careless move. And if you want the opposite extreme — a game where the shuffle almost never decides anything — FreeCell hides nothing at all.