Solitaire Fun Card

If you like playing card you may know about solitaire, this game us also called patience or cabale, family of card games played by one person. Solitaire was originally called (in various spellings) either patience, as it still is in England, Poland, and Germany, or cabale, as it still is in Scandinavian countries.

The terms patience and solitaire have been applied to indicate any one-player card-related activity, including building card houses, flipping cards into a hat, and arranging them into mathematical “magic squares.” However, the vast majority of card solitaires, reflecting the most usual understanding of the word, denote an activity whereby the player starts with a shuffled pack and attempts, by following a more-or-less complicated series of maneuvers specified by the rules, to get all the cards arranged in numerical order, often also separated into their component suits. Some games of this type, such as spite and malice, racing demon, and spit, are played competitively by two or more players, thus calling into question the suitability of the term solitaire.

Card solitaires originated toward the end of the 18th century, apparently in the Baltic region of Europe and possibly as a form of fortune-telling; whether or not a game “came out” supposedly indicated whether or not the player’s desire would come true. This origin is suggested by a surge of interest in cartomancy (see tarot) at that time, a marked similarity between the way cards are laid out for both activities, the significance of the word cabale (“secret knowledge”), and some contemporary literary references. A German book of 1793 represents patiencespiel as a contest between two players, each of whom in turn plays a game of what appears to be “grandfather” patience while they and the bystanders lay bets on the outcome. The oldest known collection of patience games was published in Russia in 1826; others followed in Germany and France. The first English-language collections appeared in the 1860s, many of them translations from French or German. Charles Dickens represented Magwitch as playing “a complicated kind of patience with ragged cards” in Great Expectations (1861), and Queen Victoria’s German husband, Albert, was a keen player.