Rosamund's Bower

Rosamund's Bower, also known simply as Rosamund, is a single player patience or solitaire card game played with one standard pack of fifty two playing cards. The game was first documented in 1898 by the English writer Mary Whitmore Jones, and its layout is built around the medieval legend of King Henry the Second and his mistress Fair Rosamund, whom legend says the king kept hidden in a bower to protect her from his jealous queen. At the start of play the Queen of Hearts, the King of Clubs and the Jack of Spades are set out along with eight guard cards arranged in a cross shaped pattern representing the bower and its defenses, with the Jack of Spades cast as an antagonist trying to keep the king and his mistress apart. The player draws from a stock pile and manages three waste piles while building foundations in descending sequence, with up to three redeals of the waste piles permitted before the game is declared lost. A typical game takes about ten minutes to play, and the odds of successfully completing the layout and reuniting the two title characters as the final cards are roughly one in four, making it a moderately difficult patience game rather than an easy one.