Patriarchs is a

patience (or forbearance) is the ability to endure difficult circumstances. Patience may involve perseverance in the face of delay; tolerance of provocation without responding in disrespect/anger; or forbearance when under strain, especially when face ...

card solitaire Patience (Europe), card solitaire or solitaire (US/Canada), is 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. Most are inte ...

which is played with two packs of

playing card A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a f ...

s."Patriarchs" (p.96) in ''The Little Book of Solitaire'', Running Press, 2002. It is similar in reserve layout to

Odd and Even Odd and Even is a solitaire card game which is played with two decks of playing cards. It is so called because the building is done in twos, resulting in odd and even numbers. Rules First, nine cards are dealt in three rows of three cards each, a ...

but with different rules of play.

Rules

First, one king and one ace are removed from the deck and placed in two columns: one with all aces and the other with all kings. In between these two columns is a space for the reserve, which is composed of nine cards arranged in three rows of three cards each. Ace and King columns are the foundations. The ace foundations are built up to Kings while the king foundations are built down to aces, all by suit. When the top cards of the ace and king foundations of the same suit are in sequence, a reversal can be done, i.e. cards can be moved one at a time from one foundation to the other, except the base aces and kings. The nine reserve cards are available for play on the foundations (not on each other). When a card leaves the reserve, the space it leaves behind is filled with the top card of the waste pile (or the stock if there is no waste pile yet). If play comes to a standstill in the reserve, the stock is dealt one card at a time, and if a card is unplayable, it is placed on the waste pile, the top card of which is available for building on the foundations or filling a space on the reserve. Only one redeal is allowed; to do this the unused cards in the waste pile is picked up and turned face down to be used as the new stock. The game is won when all cards end up in the foundations.

Variations

Picture Patience is a solitaire game which is played exactly like Patriarchs except for the following: *At the onset, no card is placed in the foundations; aces and kings needed are mixed in the deck. *Reversals are not allowed.

involves building by 2s, but is in essence much the same game as Patriarchs. Both Odd and Even and Patriarchs are closely related to Royal Cotillion, which has very similar rules of play but a reserve of sixteen cards. This in turn is closely related to

Contradance Contra dance (also contradance, contra-dance and other variant spellings) is a form of folk dancing made up of long lines of couples. It has mixed origins from English country dance, Scottish country dance, and French dance styles in the 17th ...

(Cotillion) and the single-deck game Captured Queens (Quadrille), both of which have no reserve and are entirely luck-based.

Rules

Variations

References

See also