Patience Game

Two words, one family

Is patience the same thing as solitaire?

Yes, for card games. Patience and solitaire name the same family: any card game played by one person. Which word you grew up with is a matter of geography rather than rules.

The complication is that in Britain, solitaire originally meant something else entirely — the peg-board puzzle with marbles in a cross, which arrived in the seventeenth century and had nothing to do with cards. British writers therefore used patience for cards and kept solitaire for the pegs, and older British rule books are strict about it.

American usage never made that distinction, and when software came along it was American software. Two decades of Windows shipping a game called Solitaire did more to settle the question than any rule book ever had. Today both words are understood everywhere; patience simply sounds older, and in Britain it still sounds correct.

Around Europe

What the game is called elsewhere

Nearly every European language settled on its own word, and a few of them are more evocative than either English option.

Where it began

A game that had to wait four hundred years

Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century. Nobody appears to have written down a game for a single player until the very end of the eighteenth — a gap of roughly four hundred years, which is odd for such an obvious idea. The earliest printed patiences turn up in northern Europe around 1800, and the first substantial English-language collections follow in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Victorian Britain is where the family exploded. Patience suited the period exactly: it was solitary, quiet, faintly improving, and required nothing but a deck and a table. Collections were published, reprinted and plagiarised freely, and the same game acquired different names in different books — which is why so many games in the list below carry three or four aliases, and why two Victorian sources can describe "the same" patience with rules that do not match.

That naming chaos is the tradition's one lasting inconvenience. It is also why every game page on this site states exactly which version it implements rather than assuming there is only one.

The old canon

Classic patiences, and the names they hide behind

These are games from the Victorian and Edwardian collections that are still played. The middle column is the reason patience literature is so hard to navigate.

The Klondike row is the one worth pausing on. In several British collections the name Canfield is attached to the seven-column game, while the reserve game Americans call Canfield is published as Demon. If you follow a British rule book and an American one at the same time, you will end up playing two different games and blaming yourself.

Worth noticing too: Flower Garden and Baker's Dozen hide nothing at all. The idea of a patience with no face-down cards is Victorian, not modern — it predates FreeCell, the game most people assume invented it, by well over a century.

Still in use

Does anyone still say patience?

In Britain, routinely. It is the word in most published card-game references, it is what the older generation says without thinking, and it is what you will see on the spine of any secondhand Hoyle. British newspapers print patience puzzles under that name.

Online is a different story, because search follows software. Almost every app, site and app store listing uses solitaire, so that is the word people type — including in Britain. This page exists because the older word is still the right one, and because anyone searching for it deserves more than a redirect to a page that never uses it.