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 Tiles are usually thin, square or rectangular coverings manufactured from hard-wearing material such as ceramic, stone, metal, baked clay, or even glass. They are generally fixed in place in an array to cover roofs, floors, walls, edges, or o ...

, pegs or stones. These games include

peg solitaire Peg solitaire, Solo Noble or simply Solitaire is a board game for one player involving movement of pegs on a board with holes. Some sets use marbles in a board with indentations. The game is known as solitaire in Britain and as peg solitaire in ...

and

mahjong solitaire Mahjong solitaire (also known as Shanghai solitaire, electronic or computerized mahjong, solitaire mahjong or simply mahjong) is a single-player matching game that uses a set of mahjong tiles rather than cards. It is more commonly played on a ...

. The game is most often played by one person, but can incorporate others.

History

The origins of Card Solitaire or

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 faced ...

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 Solitaire is a computer game included with Microsoft Windows, based on a card game of the same name, also known as Klondike. Its original version was programmed by Wes Cherry, and the cards were designed by Susan Kare. History Microsoft has ...

in a digital implementation included with the

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

operating system from 1990 onwards.

Types of solitaire games

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 ...

, 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 Spiders ( order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species ...

Yukon Yukon (; ; formerly called Yukon Territory and also referred to as the Yukon) is the smallest and westernmost of Canada's three territories. It also is the second-least populated province or territory in Canada, with a population of 43,964 as ...

, and FreeCell. *

Mahjong solitaire Mahjong solitaire (also known as Shanghai solitaire, electronic or computerized mahjong, solitaire mahjong or simply mahjong) is a single-player matching game that uses a set of mahjong tiles rather than cards. It is more commonly played on a ...

is a single-player matching game that uses a set of

mahjong tiles Mahjong tiles () are tiles of Chinese origin that are used to play mahjong as well as mahjong solitaire and other games. Although they are most commonly tiles, they may refer to playing cards with similar contents as well. Development The ...

rather than playing cards. It is more commonly played on a computer, than as a physical tabletop game. *

Peg solitaire Peg solitaire, Solo Noble or simply Solitaire is a board game for one player involving movement of pegs on a board with holes. Some sets use marbles in a board with indentations. The game is known as solitaire in Britain and as peg solitaire in ...

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 In chemistry, concentration is the abundance of a constituent divided by the total volume of a mixture. Several types of mathematical description can be distinguished: '' mass concentration'', ''molar concentration'', ''number concentration'', an ...

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.

References

External links

* David Parlett
Historic Card Games: Patience playing-card solitaires
{{Solitaire Single-player games Patience games

History

Types of solitaire games

See also

References

External links