Klondike, Spider and FreeCell: A Short History of Solitaire

Solitaire is probably the most played computer game of all time, but it’s a lot older than computers. People were laying out cards to play on their own more than two centuries ago. Here’s where the three best-known versions came from, and what makes each one different.

Want to play? Try Klondike, Spider or FreeCell.

Patience before computers

The earliest known mention of a one-player card game is in a German book of games from 1788, which calls it Patience. The games seem to have spread from Germany and Scandinavia to France and then Britain in the early 1800s. In Britain they kept the name patience; in the United States they became solitaire, a word that had earlier been used for a peg puzzle.

By the 1870s patience was a popular pastime, and books of layouts appeared, starting with Lady Adelaide Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience. Several games are named after Napoleon, and there’s a story that he played patience in exile on St Helena, but there’s little evidence for it.

There are hundreds of solitaire games. They nearly all share a few ideas: a tableau of columns you build on, foundations where you sort cards by suit, and sometimes a stock of spare cards to draw from.

Klondike

Klondike is the game most people simply call “solitaire”. It’s named after the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada’s Yukon (1896 to 1899), and the story goes that prospectors passed the long evenings playing it, though nobody knows for certain how the name stuck.

The rules are the ones most people learn first: seven columns with only the top card face up, build down in alternating colors, and work through the stock for cards you need. The question every player argues about is draw 1 or draw 3. Turning one card at a time lets you see the whole stock on every pass. Turning three means you can only play every third card unless you free up the ones above it, which makes planning matter much more.

In the US, Klondike is sometimes wrongly called Canfield. Canfield is a different game, named after Richard Canfield, a casino owner in the 1890s who is said to have sold players a deck for $52 and paid them $5 for every card they got onto the foundations. Most players lost money.

How many games can you win?

Not every Klondike deal can be won, and you can’t tell which ones by looking. Computer studies suggest that around 8 in 10 deals could be won by a player who knew where every face-down card was. Real players don’t, so they win far less often, especially at draw 3. Draw 1 is much more forgiving.

Spider

Spider is played with two decks across ten columns, and you win by building eight complete runs from king down to ace in a single suit. Eight runs, like a spider’s eight legs, is the usual explanation of the name.

The twist is that you can put any card on one a rank higher, regardless of suit, but you can only move a run as a group if it’s all one suit. That makes Spider a game of untangling: mixed-suit stacks are easy to build and hard to undo. Dealing a new row onto every column, which you’ll need to do five times, adds more cards on top of the mess.

Spider was well known by the 1940s, when card game writers were already calling it one of the best solitaires. Its modern popularity comes from Microsoft, which added it to Windows in 2000. Playing with one suit (every card is a spade) became the relaxed version most people know, while four suits is one of the hardest common solitaires.

FreeCell

FreeCell grew out of an older game called Baker’s Game, which the writer Martin Gardner described in Scientific American in 1968. In Baker’s Game you build in suit, which makes it very hard.

In 1978, Paul Alfille, then a medical student at the University of Illinois, wrote a version for PLATO, an early networked teaching computer. He changed the rule to build in alternating colors, and the result was FreeCell. All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns, and four “free cells” each hold one card while you rearrange. With nothing hidden, there’s no luck once the cards are dealt: every move is a decision.

The 32,000 deals

Microsoft programmer Jim Horne brought FreeCell to Windows in the early 1990s, and it shipped with Windows 95. Each deal had a number from 1 to 32,000, so players could compare notes on the same game. In 1994 an online group called the Internet FreeCell Project set out to solve all of them. They did, except one: game #11982, which has no solution. Computers have since checked millions of deals, and fewer than one in a hundred thousand turns out to be impossible.

So in FreeCell, if you lose, it’s almost certainly a move you could have made differently, which is exactly what makes it satisfying.

How Windows made solitaire famous

Microsoft Solitaire, a version of Klondike, came with Windows 3.0 in 1990. It was written by Wes Cherry, a summer intern, and the card designs were by Susan Kare, who also drew many of the original Macintosh icons. Microsoft included it partly to teach people to use a mouse: dragging a card onto a pile was practice for dragging files into folders.

It worked, perhaps too well: offices everywhere lost hours to it. Minesweeper, Hearts, FreeCell and later Spider followed. In 2019 Microsoft Solitaire was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

Which one should you play?

Game	Decks	Luck or skill?	Good for
Klondike	1	Some of both: face-down cards mean some deals can’t be won	The classic. Draw 1 to relax, draw 3 for a challenge
Spider	2	Mostly skill, with a long game	Longer sessions. Start with one suit, then try two
FreeCell	1	Almost pure skill: everything is face up	Thinking ahead. Nearly every deal can be won

All three here have unlimited undo, so feel free to experiment.