
Solitaire is any tabletop game which one can play by oneself, usually with cards, but also with dominoes. The term "solitaire" is also used for single-player games of concentration and skill using a set layout
tiles, pegs or stones. These games include
peg solitaire and
mahjong solitaire. The game is most often played by one person, but can incorporate others.
History
The origins of Card Solitaire or
Patience are unclear, but the earliest records appear in the late 1700s across northern Europe and Scandinavia. The term ''Patiencespiel'' appears in ''Das neue Königliche L’Hombre-Spiel'', a German book published in 1788. Books were also reported to appear in Sweden and Russia in the early 1800s. There are additional references to Patience in French literature. In the United States, the first card solitaire book, ''Patience: A series of thirty games with cards'', was published by Ednah Cheney in 1870.
The most popular card solitaire is
Klondike, which was called
Microsoft Solitaire in a digital implementation included with the
Windows operating system from 1990 onwards.
Types of solitaire games
*
Patience or
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 int ...
, also known as "solitaire with
cards", generally involves placing cards in a layout, and sorting them according to specific rules.
[Yan, X., Diaconis, P., Rusmevichientong, P., & Roy, B. V. (2005). Solitaire: Man versus machine. In ''Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems'' (pp. 1553-1560).] The most common solitaire card game is
Klondike. Other popular variations include
Spider,
Yukon, and
FreeCell.
*
Mahjong solitaire is a single-player matching game that uses a set of
mahjong tiles rather than playing cards. It is more commonly played on a computer, than as a physical tabletop game.
*
Peg solitaire is a board game where the goal is to empty the board of pegs through movement and capturing. It is more of a puzzle than a game, since it is repeatable once it is solved.
*
Concentration also known as ''Memory'', ''Pelmanism'' or simply ''Pairs'', is a card game in which all of the cards are laid face down on a surface and two cards are flipped face up over each turn. The object of the game is to turn over pairs of matching cards.
See also
*
List of patience games
References
External links
* David Parlett
Historic Card Games: Patience playing-card solitaires
{{Solitaire
Single-player games
Patience games