The History of Klondike Solitaire: Patience, a Gold Rush Name and Windows

Patience before Klondike

In 1791 a German games anthology, Das neue Königliche L’Hombre-Spiel, printed a description of a game it called Patience and also Cabale. The card historian David Parlett notes that the 1783 edition of the same book doesn’t have it. The game in that account is a contest. Two players take turns, and they and the people watching bet on who will get the cards out. Parlett leaves open whether patience started as a game for one or as a duel that people later practiced alone.

The same years saw cards laid out to tell fortunes, and the two habits sit close together. Parlett points out that kabala is the Polish word for telling fortunes with cards, and that a French dictionary defines réussite, a French name for patience, as a layout used to learn whether a venture will succeed. He stops short of saying which came first.

From Germany the trail runs north and east. A Swedish journal of 1808–9 has a major playing patience, and at least six Swedish collections were printed before 1850. The oldest known book given entirely to these games came out in Moscow in 1826. A French collection had reached its third edition by 1842. The tale that Napoleon played patience in exile rests, Parlett shows, on a misread passage about a companion breaking in a sticky pack.

The books in English

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first record of patience as a card game is from 1861, when Dickens gave Magwitch a ragged pack and “a complicated kind of Patience” in Great Expectations. Collections followed within a decade. Ednah Cheney’s Patience: A Series of Games with Cards was entered for copyright in Boston in 1869, and Parlett counts it the first American collection, dating it 1870. Her preface says Americans knew the games in only one or two simple forms, under the French name of solitaire.

In London, Lady Adelaide Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience became the standard work. Its second edition is dated 1874. Nobody can date the first, because the British Museum’s copy was destroyed by an incendiary bomb. Cadogan’s opening pages fixed a vocabulary that later books kept. The layout is the tableau, cards set aside for later are the talon, and an available card is one that nothing else is blocking.

Klondike isn’t in Cheney’s book, and it entered Cadogan’s only in an American edition of 1914, revised to add games from the United States. Many of the early favorites were long games for two packs shuffled together. The seven-column game for a single pack belongs to the next generation of rule books, printed after 1900, and it reached them from the gambling table as much as from the parlor.

The gold rush and the name

In August 1896, Skookum Jim and his family found gold near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Word reached the outside world almost a year later. The United States National Park Service counts about 100,000 people who set out, and about 18,000 at Dawson by the summer of 1898. The rush ended as quickly as it began, and the next year’s strike at Nome drew the crowd away.

For a few years Klondike was the most talked-about place name in North America, and a card game called Klondike was in print by 1907. Parlett ties the name to the gold rush, and the dates fit. That is as far as the evidence goes. No rule book from the time explains the name, and nothing among the sources for this chapter shows prospectors inventing the game or playing it in the camps.

Other explanations are guesses. One collector, Peter Voke, has wondered whether the word could come from the Dutch for small triangle, after the shape of the layout. The solitaire researcher Michael Keller, who reports the idea, also notes that the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest uses of Klondike for a gambling game may refer to a dice game. The honest answer is that nobody knows who named the card game.

The first rules in print

The earliest printing Keller has found is in a British book, Tarbart’s Patience Games, where page 64 of the 1905 second edition describes the draw-three form of the game under the name Gambler’s Delight. The book was first issued in 1901. Keller calls this possibly the first publication of Klondike, and the name is a hint about where the game was being played.

The name arrives in the 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games, published in New York, and it arrives twice. The book’s main entry for Klondike is a different game, with thirteen cards counted off into a reserve and four piles to build on. The entry that follows, “Seven-Card Klondike”, is introduced as a much simpler method. It deals seven piles with one card face up on each, puts the Aces in a line above, builds down in changing colors and lets only a King into a space.

Two details differ from the modern game. The pack is run off in threes for as long as that changes anything, with an alternative of one card at a time, once through. And the face-up cards on a pile move all together or not at all, so you couldn’t split a run the way the strategy guide suggests.

Klondike, Canfield and Demon

Richard Canfield bought a casino in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1884 and owned it until 1911. A solitaire was dealt there for money, and his name stuck to it. Which solitaire is the puzzle. Morehead and Mott-Smith’s Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games, a standard American reference, says it was the thirteen-card reserve game. Keller doubts that and thinks it may well have been Klondike.

The books of the time don’t settle it. Two American collections of 1908, by Harris Dick and George Hapgood, print the seven-column game under the name Canfield. The 1913 edition of the United States Playing Card Company’s Official Rules of Card Games has separate entries for Klondike and Canfield. A year later the American edition of Lady Cadogan’s book reprints the seven-column rules from that company and heads them “Canfield or Klondike”.

American usage slowly gave Canfield to the reserve game, which British players call Demon, and left Klondike with the seven columns. It was slow. Somerset Maugham described playing “Canfield” in a 1930 travel book while plainly laying out Klondike, and Keller has found an American book still using the name that way in 1966. One of the authors of a 2019 study of these games recalls that his mother used Demon for one game and his father used it for the other.

Playing for money

The 1907 Hoyle’s Games gives the terms of the gambling game exactly. The banker sells the pack for $52 and pays $5 for every card the player gets into the top line. Eleven cards or more is a profit, and ten or fewer is a loss. Dick’s 1908 book has the house selling the pack for fifty-two dollars in the seven-column game, and the 1914 Cadogan edition repeats the terms in counters.

The card game site Pagat records that casinos of the early twentieth century did offer solitaire at these kinds of stakes, first with a game called Sir Tommy and later with Klondike. It adds that the games were slow and needed close watching when played with real cards, so they never amounted to much on the casino floor. The eleven-card target was the whole of the game’s appeal as a bet.

The arrangement outlived the casinos in software. Many computer versions offer what is known as Vegas scoring, which charges 52 for the deal, pays 5 for each card on a foundation and, in the stricter forms, allows no redeal, so you get one trip through the stock. LarkSpark doesn’t use it. Nothing is staked here but your time.

Onto the computer

Solitaire reached home computers almost as soon as there were home computers. In 1981 the Atari Program Exchange, Atari’s mail-order catalog of programs written by its users, sold a card game titled Solitaire for the Atari 400 and 800. The Atarimania archive credits it to Mark Reid and lists it as written in BASIC and played with a joystick. The entry doesn’t say which solitaire it dealt.

Michael Casteel wrote Klondike for the Macintosh in 1984, the year the machine went on sale. By his own account he built it on a borrowed Apple Lisa and a 128K Mac, in Pascal. It was sold in a box at first and then found its audience as shareware. In January 1987 it won a Boston Computer Society award for Macintosh public domain and shareware programs. Casteel has kept it going through every change of Mac hardware since, and a 2016 report found him still maintaining it in retirement.

These programs set the pattern. The computer shuffled, dealt, enforced the rules and cleared the table, which took the tedious parts out of a game that is mostly tedious parts when played by hand. A solitaire on the Macintosh was also what one Microsoft intern had been playing when he decided to write his own for Windows.

Windows Solitaire

In the summer of 1988 Wes Cherry, a student working as an intern at Microsoft, wrote a Klondike game for Windows, modeled on one he had played on the Macintosh. The historian of computer games known as the Digital Antiquarian tells the rest. Cherry left the program on a company server and went back to school. A manager looking for something livelier than Reversi found it, and it shipped with Windows 3.0 in May 1990. Susan Kare refined the card faces. Cherry was given a computer for fixing the bugs and received no royalties.

Microsoft’s stated reason for including it was to teach people a graphical interface, and The Strong National Museum of Play agrees that dragging cards was good mouse practice. The museum adds that an early build had a “boss key” that threw up a fake spreadsheet, removed before release. Offices noticed anyway. Reason magazine’s account of the period has Sears deleting the built-in games from its computers in 1994 and the state of Virginia ordering them off 103,000 machines in 1995.

The game was rewritten for Windows Vista, and since Windows 10 in 2015 it has been part of the Microsoft Solitaire Collection. The Strong inducted Microsoft Solitaire into its World Video Game Hall of Fame in 2019 and reckons it has been installed on more than a billion computers. On the thirtieth anniversary, May 22, 2020, Microsoft counted more than 35 million players a month and more than 100 million hands a day.

The mathematics of winning

In 1946 the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, recovering from an illness and playing solitaire, wondered what the chances were that a game he called Canfield would come out. He gave up on calculating it and thought of simply playing a hundred games and counting. That idea, carried over to the new electronic computers, became the Monte Carlo method. Which game he meant by Canfield is, fittingly, not known.

The question stayed open. In 2004 four researchers at Stanford and Cornell, Persi Diaconis among them, called it “one of the embarrassments of applied mathematics” that the odds of winning ordinary solitaire couldn’t be determined. They studied thoughtful solitaire, the same game with every card’s position known. A human expert who recorded 2,000 games of it, at about twenty minutes each, won 36.6%. Their best program won about 70%. In 2007 a team at Oregon State University showed that between 82% and 91.44% of Draw Three deals have a winning line.

Charlie Blake and Ian Gent narrowed that with a solver called Solvitaire, first reported in 2019 and published in 2026. Over a million deals, 81.945% were winnable at Draw Three and 90.480% at Draw One. Only about one winnable Draw Three deal in two hundred needs a card brought back down from a foundation. These are ceilings for a player who sees everything. The authors say the best possible rate with hidden cards and no undo isn’t known to within a factor of two.

How LarkSpark plays it

Those figures leave roughly one random deal in ten unwinnable at Draw One and nearly one in five at Draw Three. LarkSpark takes them out. Before a deal reaches your table, a solver has played it through to the end in the mode you chose, so every game of Klondike here can be won. Finding the way is still your job.

The rules are the generous modern ones, set out in full in the rules. You choose Draw One or Draw Three and go through the stock as often as you like. Runs can be split, a card can come back down from a foundation, and only a King fills an empty column. Undo reaches back sixty moves, a hint shows a legal move, and Auto-complete finishes the game once every card in the columns is face up.

There is no score and no stake. Each mode keeps your best time, your fewest moves and your wins, and Replay this deal lets you take the same cards on again. The strategy guide covers how to read a deal, which columns to open first and when to leave a card where it is. The solver has already shown there is a way through.

The history of Klondike