Patience (game)
Patience refers (in the UK and Australia) to a solitaire game with cards. In the US, the term Solitaire is often used specifically to refer to solitaire with cards. Both Solitaire and Patience are sometimes used to refer specifically to Klondike, one of the most popular; see List of solitaire card games for details on some others.
The purpose of Patience generally involves manipulating a layout of cards with a goal of sorting them in some manner. However it is possible to play the same games competitively (often a head to head race) and cooperatively.
Patience games typically involve dealing cards from a shuffled deck into a prescribed arrangement on a tabletop, from which the player attempts to reorder the deck by suit and rank through a series of moves transferring cards from one place to another under prescribed restrictions. Some games allow for the reshuffling of the deck(s), and/or the placement of cards into new or "empty" locations.
There is a vast array of variations on the patience theme, using either one or more decks of cards, with rules of varying complexity and skill levels. Many of these have been converted to electronic form and are available as computer games. Basic forms of Klondike solitaire and FreeCell come with every current installation of Microsoft Windows.
History
The game is most likely German or Scandinavian in origin. The game became popular in France in the early 19th Century reaching England and America in the latter half. Patience was first mentioned in literature shortly after cartomantic layouts were developed circa 1765. The earliest known recording of a game of patience occurred in 1783 in the German game anthology Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel. Before this, there were no literary mentions of such games in large game compendiums such as Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester (1674) and Abbé Bellecour's Academie des Jeux (1674).
There is an old tradition in the German or Scandinavian countries to use "patience" as a guide to what the near future has to offer, a kind of "luck" meter. This belief assumes that a person’s "luck" will vary from time to time and important matters should not be initiated or conducted when the cards are not favourable. If there are no winnings in the game for a number of tries it spells caution in what you do. If you win at the first try times are good and “luck” smiles at you, thus the immediate future can be used for important decisions. Timing the game is a further indicator of the strength of the outcome.
Napoleon was said to have "played patience" during his exile; however from written accounts, he played Vingt-Un, Piquet, and Whist but not Patience. The story is thought to have arisen from a misinterpretation. Nonetheless, many patience games were named after him, such as Napoleon at St. Helena, Napoleon's Square, etc.
Magda Goebbels played patience in the Führerbunker after she killed her six children.[1]
The first collection of patience card games in the English language is attributed to Lady Adelaide Cadogan through her Illustrated Games of Patience, published in about 1870 and reprinted several times. Other collections quickly followed such as Patience by E. D. Cheney (1869), Amusement for Invalids by Annie B. Henshaw (1870), and later Dick's Games of Patience, published by Dick and Fitzgerald. Other books about patience written towards the end of the 19th century were by H. E. Jones (a.k.a. Cavendish), Angelo Lewis (a.k.a. Professor Hoffman), Basil Dalton, Ernest Bergholt, and Mary Whitmore Jones.
See also
- List of solitaire card games
- Solitaire terminology, for solitaire with cards
- Patience sorting, a computer algorithm
- Soltrio Solitaire
- Software Solitaires:
References
- Lee, Sloane & Packard, Gabriel. 100 Best Solitaire Games: 100 Ways to Entertain Yourself with a Deck of Cards. ; New York, N. Y.: Cardoza Publishing, 2004. (ISBN 1-58042-115-6)
- Arnold, Peter. Card Games for One. London: Hamlyn, 2002 (ISBN 0-600-60727-5)
- Moorehead, Albert H. & Mott-Smith, Geoffrey. The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games. New York: Bantam Books, 1977 (ISBN 0-553-26240-8)
- Crépeau, Pierre. The Complete Book of Solitaire (a translation of Le Grand Livre des Patiences). Willowdale, Ontario: Firefly Books, 2001. (ISBN 1-55209-597-5)
- Marks, Arnold & Harrod, Jacqueline. Card Games Made Easy. Surrey, England: Clarion, 1997 (ISBN 1-899606-17-3)
External links
- The Official Solitare Game
- Patience (game) at Curlie
- Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience, by Adelaide Cadogan, 1914, from Project Gutenberg
- Games of patience for one or more players, second series, by Mary Whitmore Jones, about 1898, original book-scan from Archive.org