Solitaire history and variants

A European origin, older than most people assume

Single-player card games, the ancestors of modern solitaire, appear in Northern Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century, most likely in Scandinavia or German-speaking regions, before spreading to France and the rest of the continent. The earliest written rule collections date from the start of the nineteenth century, a period when the game gained popularity in aristocratic drawing rooms as a way to pass time alone, at a moment when most card games were played in groups.

The name Klondike, now attached to the most widely played version (the one on this page), comes from the Yukon region of Canada, the site of a famous gold rush at the very end of the nineteenth century. The game is said to have spread among prospectors as a way to fill the long hours between two days of digging, which explains the name that stuck ever since, even though the game itself predates that episode.

Solitaire, patience, regular solitaire: same game, different labels

Depending on where in the world someone learned the game, they might call it by a different name without meaning anything different by it:

Solitaire

The name used in the United States and most of North America, and now the most common term worldwide thanks to Windows including it by default from 1990 onward.

Patience

The name used in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and much of the Commonwealth. It emphasizes the calm, methodical nature of the game rather than the fact that it is played alone. A search for a patience card game and a search for solitaire online are looking for the exact same thing.

Regular solitaire / classic solitaire

Not a separate variant, just a way of specifying Klondike (the version on this page) when someone wants to distinguish it from Spider, FreeCell, or one of the newer variants covered further down. The rules do not change.

None of these labels point to a different set of rules: whether the search was for a free solitaire game, a patience card game, or a classic solitaire game, it is the same single-player card game underneath, with the same basic rules. The full rule breakdown lives on the how to play solitaire page.

Klondike, the version played on this page

When someone just says solitaire without any qualifier, they almost always mean Klondike: seven tableau columns, four foundations, and a stock pile that turns over one or three cards at a time. That is the version playable directly on this site's solitaire homepage. Its popularity comes largely from being bundled by default with Windows since 1990, which made it the single most familiar card game for several generations of computer users.

Is every deal winnable? What the research actually says

Not every Klondike deal can be won, and that is true no matter how carefully it is played. In 2019, researchers building a general-purpose solver called Solvitaire calculated the winnability of Klondike precisely for the first time: about 82% of deals (81.945%, with a very tight confidence interval) are winnable under "thoughtful" play, meaning every card's rank and suit is known in advance, including the face-down ones. The remaining roughly 18% cannot be won by any sequence of moves, regardless of skill. In practice, without that kind of perfect information, real players win far less often, since face-down cards and draw order hide information a real player does not have. This matters most in draw-3 mode, where more cards stay buried behind others for longer, and it is one of the reasons the solitaire tips page recommends recognizing a genuinely stuck position early rather than cycling the stock pile hoping something changes.

The other major solitaire families

Beyond Klondike, several other well-known solitaire variants exist, sharing the same general idea of a single-player card game but with meaningfully different rules:

• Spider is played with two full decks (104 cards) across ten tableau columns. The goal is to build complete same-suit sequences from king down to ace, rather than filling separate foundations by suit.
• FreeCell deals every card face up from the very start, across eight columns, with four free cells that act as temporary holding spots. Because every card is visible immediately, almost every FreeCell deal is winnable, unlike Klondike's roughly 18% that never can be.
• Pyramid drops the column layout entirely. Cards are arranged in a triangle, and the goal is to remove pairs of cards whose values add up to thirteen.
• Golf and TriPeaks, two newer variants popularized by video game adaptations, rely on a single discard pile and a running sequence of consecutive cards to clear, with no separate foundation-by-suit concept at all.

From a physical deck to a screen

The move from a physical deck of cards on a table to a digital version is recent compared to the age of the game itself: only about thirty years. That move changed a few habits without touching the rules: shuffling became instant and perfectly random, there is no more deck to gather up and put away at the end of a round, and starting a fresh deal takes a single click instead of a full reshuffle by hand. The underlying idea is exactly the one codified more than two centuries ago: one player, one deck, and a sequence of logical decisions to sort everything back into order.

Why this site offers only Klondike

Offering one variant instead of a catalog of several comes from a simple observation: the large majority of searches around the word solitaire, whether phrased as solitaire, patience, or classic solitaire, are looking specifically for Klondike. A single, well-built version that loads instantly and skips unnecessary extras serves that intent better than a library of variants spreading attention thin across each one. Tips for improving specifically at this version are gathered on the solitaire tips page, and the Auto Complete and Daily Challenge buttons above the board (once a deal's tableau is fully face up, and a fresh fixed deal every day) are covered on the how to play solitaire page.