Patience Card Game

Patience is the British and international name for the card game Americans call solitaire. It is the same game: a single player deals a layout from a shuffled deck, then tries to sort every card into order by suit, following fixed rules about which cards may move where. The name describes the experience. There is no opponent and no clock — just you, the deal, and a tangle of cards that rewards calm, methodical play. In Britain, Australia, and much of Europe, "patience" remains the everyday word, and card books traditionally file the whole family of one-player games under that heading. The version of patience most people know — seven columns of cards, four foundation piles built from Ace to King — is the game on this site. You can play it free in your browser, exactly as it appears in any patience rulebook.

The split is purely geographic. American English settled on "solitaire," from the French word for a game played alone, while British English kept "patience," borrowed from the German Geduldspiele ("patience games") of the eighteenth century. Strictly speaking, both words name the whole family of single-player card games — there are hundreds, from FreeCell to Spider to Pyramid. The specific layout most people picture, with its seven-column tableau and stock pile, is properly called Klondike. So "Klondike solitaire" and "classic patience" describe the identical game; one label leads with the family name, the other with the layout. Computers blurred the naming further. Microsoft shipped Klondike under the plain title "Solitaire," so for millions of players the family name and the layout fused into one. Whatever you call it, the rules on this page are the ones you already know.

Patience games first appear in print in late eighteenth-century Europe. The earliest known descriptions come from German and Scandinavian game anthologies of the 1780s and 1790s, where patience was sometimes treated less as a pastime than as a form of fortune-telling — a successful deal was a good omen. The game spread through France and Britain in the nineteenth century and became a fashionable parlor pursuit. Lady Adelaide Cadogan's "Illustrated Games of Patience," published around 1870, was among the first English-language collections and helped standardize dozens of layouts. In 1890s America, casino owner Richard Canfield famously sold decks to gamblers for fifty dollars and paid five dollars per card they managed to play to the foundations — attaching his name to a patience game in the process. The Klondike layout, named for the Yukon gold-rush region, emerged around the turn of the twentieth century and slowly crowded out its rivals. Its decisive moment came in 1990, when Microsoft included it in Windows 3.0 — partly to teach new users mouse drag-and-drop. That single decision made Klondike patience one of the most played computer games in history.

Classic patience — Klondike — uses a standard 52-card deck. Deal seven tableau columns: one card in the first column, two in the second, up to seven in the last, with only the top card of each column face up. The remaining 24 cards form the stock. Your goal is to move all 52 cards to four foundation piles, one per suit, built upward from Ace to King. On the tableau, build columns downward in alternating colors — a red Six on a black Seven, a black Jack on a red Queen. Face-up sequences move together between columns, and each time you clear a column's face-up cards, the next face-down card flips. Only a King may fill an empty column. When you run out of moves, draw from the stock — one card or three at a time, depending on the variant — and keep working until every card reaches the foundations or no moves remain.

This site is a free game of classic patience that runs in any browser — no download, no signup, and no limit on how many deals you play. Choose Turn 1 to draw one stock card at a time, the friendlier game and the best place to learn. Choose Turn 3 for the traditional challenge, where stock cards arrive in groups of three and planning matters more. Unlimited undo lets you rewind a bad line and try another, and the built-in timer, move counter, and win statistics track your progress across sessions. If a rule is fuzzy, the rules page covers the full game step by step, and the strategy guide explains how to dig out face-down cards and when to hold a King back. Deal a hand and see why this game has kept its name for two centuries.