Daily Deal

Daily Deal · History

The history of Daily Deal

Daily Deal is Klondike, the game most people simply call solitaire. Card games for one are a little over two hundred years old, Klondike’s name is a little over one hundred, and the question of how often it can be won was only pinned down in the last few years. This is the story as far as the record supports it.

Patience in northern Europe

The earliest known description of a game called Patience is in a German games anthology, Das neue Königliche L’Hombre-Spiel, in an edition printed around 1790. The card historian David Parlett finds it in the 1791 edition and not in the one from 1783. Other writers cite editions of 1788 and 1797. The book also calls the game Cabale. It describes two players taking turns at the same kind of layout while onlookers bet on the result, so it isn’t clear that the game began as something you played alone.

The next traces are from Sweden and Russia. A Swedish journal of 1808–9 mentions a major playing patience, and Parlett reports at least six Swedish collections before 1850. The oldest known book given over to patience games was printed in Moscow in 1826. French books followed, including one that had reached a third edition by 1842.

You may have read that Napoleon passed his exile on St. Helena playing patience. Parlett traces the story to a misreading. The person described at a “solitary game of patience” was a companion working a sticky pack of cards into shape at Napoleon’s whist table. Several games carry Napoleon’s name, but nothing shows he played them.

The first books in English

In 1861 Charles Dickens had Magwitch, in Great Expectations, play “a complicated kind of Patience”. Parlett notes it as the earliest use of the word for a card game that the Oxford English Dictionary records. The game had reached Britain by then, and its vocabulary shows the route it took. Tableau and talon are both French words.

Books came a few years later. In Boston, Ednah Cheney published Patience: A Series of Games with Cards in 1869. In London, Lady Adelaide Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience became the best known early collection. Its second edition is dated 1874. The date of the first is uncertain, and it is usually given as about 1870.

Klondike came into these collections late. Cadogan’s book has it in an American edition of 1914, revised to include American games, and the rules there are credited to a rule book from the United States Playing Card Company. In that version you go through the stock one card at a time, once only, and the game is over.

A name from the gold rush

Gold was found near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory in August 1896. By the following year the news had reached the West Coast ports, and the United States National Park Service puts the number who set out for the goldfields at about 100,000. The rush was over by about 1899, when gold turned up at Nome in Alaska.

A card game called Klondike appears in print within a decade. The 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games describes two. The first, plain Klondike, is a gambling game with a thirteen-card reserve. The second, “Seven-Card Klondike”, is the one you know: seven piles, the first of one card and the last of seven, Aces at the top, builds going down and changing color, and only a King in a space.

Parlett says the game was named for the gold rush, and the timing fits. The book doesn’t explain the name, and no one has shown who chose it or why. The solitaire researcher Michael Keller points to a slightly earlier appearance of the same game in an English book of 1905, under the name Gambler’s Delight.

Canfield, Demon and a tangle of names

Richard Canfield ran a casino at Saratoga Springs, New York, from 1884 to 1911. The story attached to it is that a player bought a pack for $52 and was paid $5 for every card that reached the foundations, so eleven cards showed a profit. The 1907 Hoyle’s Games gives exactly those terms for its gambling game.

Which game was actually dealt in the casino is disputed, and the names have been tangled ever since. American books of 1908 print the rules of Klondike under the name Canfield. By 1913 the United States Playing Card Company’s rule book had separate entries for the two, and the 1914 American edition of Cadogan hedges with the heading “Canfield or Klondike”.

In the United States the name Canfield settled on the reserve game, which British players call Demon. Klondike kept its gold rush name in America, although Keller has found American books calling it Canfield as late as 1966. If you meet an old rule book, check the layout before you trust the title.

Windows, 1990

In 1990 Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 with a Klondike game included, at first called Windows Solitaire. According to The Strong National Museum of Play, it was programmed by an intern, Wes Cherry, and its cards were designed by Susan Kare. It gave people who were new to the mouse something easy to practice on. Dragging a card onto a column is the same motion as dragging a file.

The game came with every version of Windows from 1990 through Windows 8.1 in 2013, and the museum reckons it has probably been installed on more than a billion computers. For a great many people it became the only solitaire they knew, and outside North America it helped make “solitaire” the usual word in place of “patience”.

The Strong inducted Microsoft Solitaire into its World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019. In 2020, on the game’s thirtieth anniversary, Microsoft said that more than 35 million people still played its solitaire collection each month, and that the collection included daily challenges.

The mathematics: how many deals can be won

In 2004 a group of researchers at Stanford and Cornell, among them the mathematician Persi Diaconis, called it “one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics” that nobody could give the odds of winning the common game of solitaire. To make the question manageable they studied what they called thoughtful solitaire, which is Klondike with every card’s position known from the start. Their human expert won 36.6% of 2,000 recorded games. Their program won about 70%.

In 2007 Ronald Bjarnason, Prasad Tadepalli and Alan Fern of Oregon State University showed that between 82% and 91.44% of draw-three deals have a winning line. Charlie Blake and Ian Gent closed the gap with a solver called Solvitaire, first reported in 2019. Over a million random deals it found 81.945% winnable at draw three, give or take 0.084%.

Daily Deal is draw one, which is kinder. The same study puts draw-one deals at 90.480% winnable. These figures are ceilings. They say a winning line exists for a player who can see every card, and the authors note that the best rate for ordinary play, with cards hidden, isn’t known even to within a factor of two.

How LarkSpark plays it

Those numbers mean roughly one random draw-one deal in ten can’t be won by anyone. A shared daily puzzle shouldn’t hand everybody a dead deal, so every Daily Deal is checked by a solver before it is published. Each one is a winnable deal. Winning it is still up to you.

The rules are the plain ones. You draw one card at a time and can go through the stock as often as you like. Columns build down in alternating colors, only a King fills an empty column, and a card can come back down from a foundation. Undo is free, and hints count in your result.

Everyone gets the same deal each day, and your time goes on the day’s board. The rules have the details, and the solving tips cover which columns to open first and when to leave a card where it is.

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