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 Konigliche 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.
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Game Type (category) Classification
Player Count Connections
Sources
1. Solitaire (Wikipedia)
Lead, first sentence
Solitaire, also called "patience" or "card solitaire," refers to a genre of card games whose common feature is that the aim is to arrange the cards in some systematic order.
Lead, origins paragraph
The earliest documented description appeared in a 1783 German publication called Das neue Koenigliche L'Hombre-Spiel, where it was called Patience.
Lead, player count sentence
Most games are designed for a single player, though some variations accommodate two or more participants competitively.
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