Solitaire, also called patience, is a broad family of card games generally played by a single player, whose common aim is to arrange a shuffled deck into a systematic order, such as suited sequences, or to pair cards off so they can be discarded. Most forms use a standard deck dealt into a prescribed tableau layout, and a player who runs out of legal moves loses that game. Historians trace the family to German and Scandinavian roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the earliest documented description appears in the 1783 German publication Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel, where a two-player version was called Patience. Scholars have also linked the family's layouts to earlier cartomantic, or fortune-telling, card spreads recorded from around 1765, a connection preserved in the Danish and Norwegian word kabal for the game. While solitaire is overwhelmingly a single-player pursuit, a small number of variants are built for two or more players competing side by side.
Facts
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Game Type (category) Classification
Player Count Connections
Sources
1. Solitaire (Wikipedia)
Introduction
Solitaire, patience, or card solitaire refer to a genre of card games whose common feature is that the aim is to arrange the cards in some systematic order or, in a few cases, to pair them off in order to discard them.
History section
The earliest known description of a game of solitaire appeared in the 1783 edition of the German game anthology Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel, where it is called Patience and describes a game between two players playing alternately. Before this, there were no literary mentions of such games in large game compendia such as Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester (1674) and Abbé Bellecour's Academie des Jeux (1674). Books were also reported to appear in Sweden and Russia in the early 1800s and the earliest book of solitaires was published in Russia in 1826.
Genre names section
American games authors Wood and Goddard state that "Patience is any game played with playing cards in which the object is to arrange the cards... in some systematic order." They note that "there are excellent games of Patience for two or more players; but most... are designed for one player" and that "Solitaire...properly applies to any game that one player can play alone." In practice, in North America the name 'solitaire' is often used totum pro parte to refer to single-player card games, although sometimes the term 'card solitaire' is used for clarity.
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