Games - Solitaire

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	Games - Solitaire

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 more commonly known as "Patience" in British English whilst "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.

There are a vast array of variations on the solitaire/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, for example, and Windows XP also includes a version of Spider. 123 Free Solitaire and PySol are two examples of solitaire collections that can be downloaded from the internet at no charge.

The term 'solitaire' is also used for single-player games of concentration and skill using a set layout of tiles, pegs or stones rather than cards. These games include:

Peg solitaire
Shanghai solitaire (computerised mahjong)

History

Like the origin of playing cards, the origins 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, solitaire (or "patience" as it was known at the time) was briefly mentioned 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), but neither one mentioned the rules or wrote what type of games they were.

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 & 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.

There are also literary references to solitaire games. Some of these are:

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace mentions a scene that took place in 1808 where the characters were playing patience.
Somerset Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour mentions Spider
and quotes playing solitaire as "a flippant disposition."
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, the character Grushenka played a solitaire game known as Fools to get through times in crises.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Solitaire ]

Games - Solitaire

History

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