Patience (game)
Encyclopedia
In the US, the term Solitaire is often used specifically to refer to solitaire with cards. Both Solitaire and Patience are sometimes used to refer specifically to Klondike, one of the most popular; see List of solitaire card games for details on some others.
Overview
The purpose of Patience generally involves manipulating a layout of cards with a goal of sorting them in some manner. However it is possible to play the same games competitively (often a head to head race) and cooperatively.Patience games typically involve dealing cards from a shuffled deck into a prescribed arrangement on a tabletop, from which the player attempts to reorder the deck by suit and rank through a series of moves transferring cards from one place to another under prescribed restrictions. Some games allow for the reshuffling of the deck(s), and/or the placement of cards into new or "empty" locations.
There is a vast array of variations on the patience theme, using either one or more decks of cards, with rules of varying complexity and skill levels. Many of these have been converted to electronic form and are available as computer games
Computer Games
"Computer Games" is a single by New Zealand group, Mi-Sex released in 1979 in Australia and New Zealand and in 1981 throughout Europe. It was the single that launched the band, and was hugely popular, particularly in Australia and New Zealand...
. Basic forms of Klondike solitaire
Klondike (solitaire)
Klondike is a Patience game . Many people refer to Klondike as patience or solitaire .- Rules :...
and FreeCell
FreeCell
FreeCell is a solitaire-based card game played with a 52-card standard deck. It is fundamentally different from most solitaire games in that nearly all deals can be solved...
come with every current installation of Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
.
History
The game is most likely German or Scandinavian in origin. The game became popular in France in the early 19th Century reaching England and America in the latter half. Patience was first mentioned in literature shortly after cartomanticCartomancy
Cartomancy is fortune-telling or divination using a deck of cards. Forms of cartomancy appeared soon after playing cards were first introduced into Europe in the 14th century...
layouts were developed circa 1765. The earliest known recording of a game of patience occurred in 1783 in the German game anthology Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel. Before this, there were no literary mentions of such games in large game compendiums
Compendium
A compendium is a concise, yet comprehensive compilation of a body of knowledge. A compendium may summarize a larger work. In most cases the body of knowledge will concern some delimited field of human interest or endeavour , while a "universal" encyclopedia can be referred to as a compendium of...
such as Charles Cotton
Charles Cotton
Charles Cotton was an English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from the French, for his contributions to The Compleat Angler, and for the highly influential The Compleat Gamester which has been attributed to him.-Early life:He was born at Beresford Hall...
's The Compleat Gamester (1674) and Abbé Bellecour's Academie des Jeux (1674).
There is an tradition in Germany to use "patience" as a guide to the future. This assumes that a person’s luck
Luck
Luck or fortuity is good fortune which occurs beyond one's control, without regard to one's will, intention, or desired result. There are at least two senses people usually mean when they use the term, the prescriptive sense and the descriptive sense...
will vary and important matters should not be initiated when the cards are not favourable. If there are no wins for a number of tries it spells caution. If you win at the first try times are good, thus the immediate future can be used for important decisions.
Napoleon was said to have "played patience" during his exile; however from written accounts, he played Vingt-Un
Blackjack
Blackjack, also known as Twenty-one or Vingt-et-un , is the most widely played casino banking game in the world...
, Piquet
Piquet
Piquet is an early 16th-century trick-taking card game for two players.- History :Piquet has long been regarded as one of the all-time great card games still being played. It was first mentioned on a written reference dating to 1535, in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais...
, and Whist
Whist
Whist is a classic English trick-taking card game which was played widely in the 18th and 19th centuries. It derives from the 16th century game of Trump or Ruff, via Ruff and Honours...
but not Patience. The story is thought to have arisen from a misinterpretation. Nonetheless, many patience games were named after him, such as Napoleon at St. Helena
Forty Thieves
Forty Thieves is a Patience game. It is quite difficult to win, and relies mostly on skill. It is also known as Napoleon at Saint Helena, Roosevelt at San Juan, Big Forty and Le Cadran.-Rules:* Two decks are used ....
, Napoleon's Square
Napoleon's Square
Napoleon's Square is a solitaire card game which uses two decks of playing cards. First described by Lady Adelaide Cadogan in the early 1900s, it is an easy variation of Forty Thieves...
, etc.
Magda Goebbels
Magda Goebbels
Johanna Maria Magdalena "Magda" Goebbels was the wife of Nazi Germany's Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels...
played patience in the Führerbunker
Führerbunker
The Führerbunker was located beneath Hitler's New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Germany. It was part of a subterranean bunker complex which was constructed in two major phases, one part in 1936 and the other in 1943...
after she killed her six children
Goebbels children
The Goebbels children were the five daughters and one son born to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda Goebbels. The children, born between 1932 and 1940, were murdered by their parents in Berlin on May 1, 1945, the day both parents committed suicide.Magda Goebbels had an...
.
The first collection of patience card games in the English language is attributed to Lady Adelaide Cadogan through her Illustrated Games of Patience, published in about 1870 and reprinted several times. Other collections quickly followed such as Patience by E. D. Cheney (1869), Amusement for Invalids by Annie B. Henshaw (1870), and later Dick's Games of Patience, published by Dick and Fitzgerald
Dick and Fitzgerald
Dick & Fitzgerald was a 19th century United States publisher, founded by William Brisbane Dick and Lawrence R. Fitzgerald, based in New York City...
. Other books about patience written towards the end of the 19th century were by H. E. Jones (a.k.a. Cavendish), Angelo Lewis (a.k.a. Professor Hoffman), Basil Dalton, Ernest Bergholt, and Mary Whitmore Jones.
A Russian version of the game, 'Fools', is played by Grushenka in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov
The Brothers Karamazov is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger and completed in November 1880...
.
See also
- List of solitaire card games
- Glossary of solitaire, for solitaire with cards
- Patience sortingPatience sortingPatience sorting is a sorting algorithm, based on a solitaire card game, that has the property of being able to efficiently compute the length of a longest increasing subsequence in a given array.-The card game:...
, a computer algorithm - Software Patience games:
- AiselRiot - part of the GNOME GamesGNOME GamesGNOME Games is a collection of computer games that is part of the standard open-source GNOME desktop environment. It includes the following games:* AisleRiot - - a suite of Solitaire card games....
package. Open sourceOpen sourceThe term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
. - Eric's Ultimate SolitaireEric's Ultimate SolitaireEric's Ultimate Solitaire is a commercial solitaire game developed by Delta Tao Software for the Macintosh. The game was later ported to Linux by Loki Software....
. - FreeCell (Windows)FreeCell (Windows)FreeCell, as included in Microsoft Windows, is a computer implementation of the card game FreeCell.-History:The first computer version of the game is believed to have been created by Paul Alfille in 1978 for the PLATO system. Microsoft developer Jim Horne, who learned the game from the PLATO...
- KPat - part of the kdegamesKdegamesThe kdegames package contains games written for the KDE. kdegames provides games in a number of genres including card games, arcade games and board games.- Arcade :*KBlocks - A Tetris clone*KBounce - A JezzBall clone for KDE...
package. Open source. - Pretty Good SolitairePretty Good SolitairePretty Good Solitaire is a game for Microsoft Windows which includes over 600 varieties of the card game solitaire. The most recent version, 12.4.0, was released on August 17, 2010, contains 750 games and uses 24-bit graphics...
- PySolPySolPySol is an open source and platform independent computer game that incorporates around 1,000 solitaire games, including card games and other types of single-player games.. It is written in the Python programming language. PySol was originated by Markus F.X.J...
- open source and cross-platform. - Solitaire (Windows)
- Spider Solitaire (Windows)Spider Solitaire (Windows)Spider Solitaire is a card game that is included in Microsoft Windows. It is a version of Spider. It was first included in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 98.-Features:...
- Soltrio SolitaireSoltrio SolitaireSoltrio Solitaire is an Xbox Live Arcade title developed by Silver Creek Entertainment for the Xbox 360, which is a bundle of 18 separate solitaire card games, which was released on May 16, 2007 for 800 Microsoft Points.-Gameplay:...
- AiselRiot - part of the GNOME Games
External links
- Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience, by Adelaide Cadogan, 1914, from Project GutenbergProject GutenbergProject Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks". Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books...
- Games of patience for one or more players, second series, by Mary Whitmore Jones, about 1898, original book-scan from Archive.org