Solitaire or Patience is any of a family of single-player card games of a generally similar character, but varying greatly in detail. The games are generally referred to as "Patience" in British English while "solitaire" is the American English term.

These 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. Solitaire has its own terminology; see solitaire terminology. There are many different solitaire games, but the term "solitaire" is often used to refer specifically to the most well-known form, called "Klondike". Klondike and some other solitaire games have been adapted into two-player competitive games.

History

Like the origin of playing cards, the origin of solitaire is largely unknown as there are no historical records to support it. Some scholars think these kinds of games are largely French in origin as early English language books about patience games refer to French literature. This can be evidenced by the names of some games written in those English books such as La Belle Lucie, Le Cadran, Le Loi Salique, La Nivernaise and others.

Napoleon was also said to have "played patience" during his exile. Some solitaire games were named after him, such as Napoleon at St. Helena, Napoleon's Square, etc. But whether he played those games or actually invented them is not known.

The first collection of solitaire card games in the English language is attributed to Lady Adelaide Cadogan through her Illustrated Games of Patience, published in about in 1870 and reprinted several times. Before this, literature about solitaire (or "patience" as it was known at the time) was non-existent, not even in such books as Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester (1674), Abbé Bellecour's Academie des Jeux (1674), and Bohn's Handbook of Games (1850), all of which are used as reference on card games. Lady Cadogan's book spawned other collections such as Patience by E. D. Cheney, Amusements for Invalids by Annie B. Henshaw (1870), and later Dick's Games of Patience, published by Dick and Fitzgerald. Other books about solitaire 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, and Ernest Bergholt.