Accordion (card game)

Accordion is a solitaire card game played with a single standard fifty-two card deck, in which the player's goal is to compress the entire deck down into one pile, an image that gives the game its name because the layout of cards grows and shrinks during play in a way that resembles the pleats of an accordion. The game is classified by solitaire historians as a closed non-builder patience game, meaning new cards are always dealt from the stock rather than built up freely by the player, and the piles the player works with can only be compressed onto each other under specific matching rules rather than constructed at will. Historically the game was known by other names before Accordion became standard in the 1950s, including The Idle Year, a name that hints at how long a full, successful game could take, along with Tower of Babel and Methuselah. Despite that history of patient, slow play, an average game of Accordion actually takes only around five minutes, but the odds of successfully compressing the whole deck into a single pile are extremely low, estimated at roughly one win in every hundred attempts, making it one of the more difficult single-player patience games to complete.