SolitaireA Short History of Solitaire, From Fortune-Telling to Windows
Solitaire is older than the computer by two centuries, older than the United States as a continental power, and quite possibly began as a way of telling fortunes. Here is how a quiet parlour pastime became the most-played computer game in history.
Northern Europe, late 1700s
The earliest written traces of solitaire appear in Germany and Scandinavia in the late eighteenth century, where collections of card games begin to include games for one player under names like Patiencespiel. The word stuck: to this day the game is “solitaire” in North America and “patience” across much of Europe.
One persistent theory is that these games grew out of cartomancy — fortune-telling with cards. The mechanics fit suspiciously well. You lay the cards out according to a fixed pattern, follow rules you cannot change, and the outcome tells you something. Whether the answer was your future or simply whether the deal came out, the ritual is the same.
The Napoleon legend
Ask around and someone will tell you Napoleon invented solitaire to pass the time in exile on Saint Helena. It is a wonderful story and there is little evidence for it. What is true is that several patience games carry his name — Napoleon at Saint Helena, Napoleon’s Square — which is probably how the legend got started. Games were named after him because he was famous, not because he dealt them.
The first rulebook
The game reached English-speaking players properly in about 1870, when Lady Adelaide Cadogan published Illustrated Games of Patience — widely regarded as the first English-language collection of solitaire rules. It went through multiple editions and effectively created the genre in Britain, turning a set of loosely remembered parlour games into something with a canon.
Other collections followed quickly through the late Victorian period, and the basic vocabulary we still use — tableau, foundation, stock, talon — settled into place around then.
A gold rush and a name
The specific game most people now call solitaire took its name from the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s, when tens of thousands of prospectors headed for the Yukon. The association is with the region and its long idle winters rather than any single inventor.
It is not a coincidence that several solitaire variants carry northern names from the same era — Yukon among them. Card games travel with people who have time to kill.
The game that taught the world to drag
In 1990, Microsoft shipped Solitaire with Windows 3.0. The program was written by Wes Cherry, then an intern, and the card faces were designed by Susan Kare, the artist behind much of the original Macintosh interface.
Its real job was educational. Windows was asking millions of keyboard-trained office workers to learn a device most had never touched, and dragging a card from one pile to another turns out to be an almost perfect mouse tutorial: click, hold, move precisely, release. Microsoft taught a generation to use a mouse by making the lesson fun enough that nobody noticed it was a lesson.
It worked far too well. Solitaire spent the next two decades as the most quietly notorious productivity problem in corporate computing, and by most measures became the most-played computer game ever made.
Cherry famously received no royalties for what may be the most-used piece of entertainment software in history. He later became a cider maker.
The browser era
The games outlived the operating systems that carried them. Klondike, Spider and FreeCell now live in browsers, on phones, in aeroplane seat-backs — anywhere with a screen and a spare few minutes.
What has not changed in two hundred and fifty years is the appeal. A shuffled deck is a small, self-contained problem with a definite answer. Sometimes you solve it. Sometimes it was never solvable. Either way it takes ten minutes, asks nothing of anyone else, and is ready to go again immediately.