Solitaire is one of the most played games in human history. Its journey spans more than two centuries — from handwritten European card tables to Microsoft Windows to the smartphone in your pocket. Along the way it has been a fortune-telling ritual, a Victorian parlour pastime, a training tool for the computer mouse, and a quiet daily habit for hundreds of millions of people. Here is the surprisingly rich story of how a simple card game conquered the world, and how much of what “everybody knows” about it is actually legend.
Solitaire or Patience? A Tale of Two Names
Before the history, a word about the word. The same family of single-player card games goes by two main names, and the split still survives today. In French, the game was called réussite (“success”) or patience, while the term solitaire — from the Latin solitarius, “alone” — was originally attached to the peg-jumping board game we now call Peg Solitaire. Over the nineteenth century, North Americans adopted “Solitaire” for card games too, while Britain and much of Europe kept “Patience.”
German speakers, meanwhile, called the pastime Patience or Geduldspiel— literally a “patience game.” That naming is a useful clue: it frames the game not as gambling but as a contemplative test of persistence, which is exactly how the earliest written sources treat it. If you enjoy tracing where terms like tableau, foundation, and talon come from, our Solitaire glossary collects the core vocabulary in one place.
Origins: Late 18th-Century Northern Europe
The earliest solid references to card patiences appear in Northern Europe — the Baltic region, Scandinavia, and the German lands — in the final decades of the 1700s. One of the first printed mentions comes from a 1783 German games anthology, Das neue königliche L'Hombre-Spiel, which included a section on laying out cards in solitary combinations. Around the same period, patience games surface in Scandinavian and Russian aristocratic circles, which is why several classic layouts still carry names like “Russian Solitaire.”
Many historians believe the game grew out of cartomancy — fortune-telling with cards. Players would deal a layout and read the arrangement as an omen: if the cards “came out,” the wish would be granted. Over time the divinatory framing faded and the puzzle itself took over, but the ritual language survived. To this day we speak of a deal “coming out” when it is solved, a direct echo of those fortune-telling roots.
From there the pastime spread quickly through Europe in the early 1800s, and France proved especially fertile ground for naming variants. Many labels still in use — “La Belle Lucie,” “La Nivernaise,” “Le Cadran” — carry that French heritage, a reminder that much of the game's early vocabulary is Continental rather than English.
The Napoleon Legend — and Why It Is Probably a Myth
No story about Solitaire is repeated more often than the claim that Napoleon Bonaparte spent his exile on the island of St. Helena (1815–1821) endlessly dealing patience to pass the empty hours. It is a wonderful image, and several classic games bear his name — “Napoleon at St. Helena” (also known as Forty Thieves), “Napoleon's Square,” and “Napoleon's Favorite” among them.
Here it is worth being careful. The detailed memoirs of Napoleon's companions on St. Helena describe his days at length — dictation, reading, chess, cards with others — yet contain little to support the idea that solitary patience was his great consolation. Historians generally treat the connection as an attractive nineteenth-century marketing story: naming a difficult two-deck game after the fallen emperor lent it romance and gravity. The legend almost certainly helped popularise Solitaire across Europe, but the games named for Napoleon were more likely christened in his honour than invented at his table. Treat the tale as folklore, not documented fact.
Victorian Codification: The First Rule Books
Solitaire only became a game with fixed, shareable rules in the Victorian era, when a wave of English-language handbooks finally wrote everything down. Before this, layouts passed by word of mouth and varied from household to household. The landmark titles include:
- 1870: Illustrated Games of Patience by Lady Adelaide Cadogan, widely regarded as the first dedicated English-language patience book. It was reprinted for decades and effectively set the template for the genre.
- 1880s: Dick's Games of Patience, published in the United States, signalling how firmly the pastime had taken root in America.
- 1890s: works by “Professor Hoffmann” (the stage magician Angelo Lewis) and by Mary Whitmore Jones, who catalogued and named dozens of layouts, cementing a shared vocabulary.
By the end of the century, hundreds of documented variants existed. This is also the era that gave us the many Solitaire variations we still play — FreeCell's ancestors, Spider, Canfield, and the game most people simply call “Solitaire” today: Klondike.
The Klondike Name and the Gold Rush
Klondike, the seven-column game that has become the default meaning of the word Solitaire, is almost certainly named after the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon and the Gold Rush of 1896–1899. The popular account holds that prospectors, snowbound through brutal northern winters, played the game to fill long dark evenings — and carried its name south when they returned. As with Napoleon, the precise link is hard to prove from primary sources, but the timing fits: the game's name spread in print in exactly the years the Gold Rush gripped North America's imagination. If you want the full ruleset, our guide to Klondike Solitaire rules walks through setup, play, and strategy step by step.
1990: Microsoft Windows Changes Everything
The single most transformative moment in Solitaire's history came on May 22, 1990, when Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 with a bundled version of Klondike. The game was written by Wes Cherry, then an intern, with the card artwork designed by Macintosh veteran Susan Kare. Its official purpose was quietly practical: to teach a generation of nervous new users the unfamiliar art of the mouse. Dragging a card from one pile to another taught click-and-drag; double-clicking a card to send it to a foundation taught the double-click — all wrapped in a game people actually wanted to play.
The cultural impact is hard to overstate:
- It introduced hundreds of millions of people to both the game and the mouse.
- It became, for years, one of the most-used pieces of software on Earth — and a byword for office procrastination, quietly running behind spreadsheets in workplaces worldwide.
- Its cascading “bouncing cards” victory animation became one of the most recognisable moments in personal computing.
Microsoft followed up by bundling FreeCell (fully included in Windows 95), Spider Solitaire (Windows XP and beyond), and eventually folded them into the Microsoft Solitaire Collection (Windows 8, 2012), which the company reports is still played by tens of millions of people every month.
The Mobile and Online Era
When smartphones arrived, Solitaire made the leap effortlessly — its tap-and-drag interface was practically designed for touchscreens. From the earliest days of the iPhone App Store in 2008, Solitaire titles were among the most downloaded games, and the free-to-play, advertising-supported model soon produced apps with hundreds of millions of installs. Online, the game found a second home in the browser, where anyone could play instantly with no download at all.
Modern Solitaire has, in a sense, come full circle. As app stores filled with ad-heavy card games, a new wave of browser-based sites returned to something clean and fast. Progressive Web Apps such as Solitaires.gg combine the convenience of a website with the capabilities of a native app — installable, playable offline, and free of app-store friction. Alongside the play itself, players increasingly explore the game's deeper appeal, from the mathematics behind Solitaire statistics and win rates to the cognitive benefits of playing as a low-stakes daily mental workout.
Solitaire Timeline at a Glance
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| c. 1780s | Card patiences documented in Northern Europe; first printed mention in 1783. |
| Early 1800s | Game spreads across Europe; French variant names take hold. |
| 1815–1821 | Napoleon's St. Helena exile spawns the enduring (and likely mythical) legend. |
| 1870 | Lady Cadogan publishes the first English-language patience book. |
| 1896–1899 | Klondike Gold Rush; the seven-column game likely takes its name. |
| 1990 | Microsoft bundles Solitaire with Windows 3.0 to teach the mouse. |
| 2008 | Solitaire arrives on the iPhone App Store from day one. |
| 2012 | Microsoft Solitaire Collection debuts, later reaching tens of millions monthly. |
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Solitaire invented?
There is no single inventor or date. The first written references to card patiences appear in Northern Europe in the late 1700s, with a German anthology of 1783 among the earliest printed mentions. The game clearly existed as an oral tradition before that.
Did Napoleon really play Solitaire in exile?
Probably not to the degree the legend claims. Several games bear his name, and the story is charming, but contemporary accounts of his exile on St. Helena offer little firm evidence. Historians generally regard the Napoleon connection as folklore rather than documented fact.
Why is it called Klondike?
The most widely accepted explanation ties the name to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–1899 in Canada's Yukon, where prospectors are said to have played the game through long winters. The name spread in print during exactly those years.
What is the difference between Solitaire and Patience?
They refer to the same family of single-player card games. “Solitaire” is the common term in North America, while “Patience” is standard in the UK and much of Europe. Klondike is the best-known variant under either name.
Why did Microsoft include Solitaire in Windows?
The bundled Windows Solitaire (1990) was designed partly as a friendly tutorial for the mouse: dragging and double-clicking cards taught new users the core gestures of a graphical interface while they enjoyed a familiar game.
Ready to be part of the story? Play free Solitaire at Solitaires.gg or learn the rules of Klondike Solitaire.