By Online Solitaire Free Editorial Team · Editorial Standards
The patience family contains several hundred documented variants, of which fewer than ten have achieved true mass recognition through Windows bundling or major app distribution. The remainder — games documented in 19th and early 20th-century patience books, games invented in specific regional card game traditions, and games that have small but dedicated communities of enthusiasts — are rarely encountered by players whose exposure to solitaire came through digital platforms. These rare solitaire games are not obscure because they are poor games. Most of them are obscure simply because they were never selected for mass digital distribution, a process that was as much a product of historical accident as of game quality.
The patience family contains several hundred documented variants, of which fewer than ten have achieved true mass recognition through Windows bundling or major app distribution. The remainder — games documented in 19th and early 20th-century patience books, games invented in specific regional card game traditions, and games that have small but dedicated communities of enthusiasts — are rarely encountered by players whose exposure to solitaire came through digital platforms. These rare solitaire games are not obscure because they are poor games. Most of them are obscure simply because they were never selected for mass digital distribution, a process that was as much a product of historical accident as of game quality.
Playing rare solitaire variants offers two specific benefits beyond novelty. First, different structural mechanics develop different planning skills — a player who has mastered Klondike, FreeCell, and Spider has developed sequence-building, stock management, and suit-tracking habits, but may never have encountered the block-placement strategy of Canfield, the cascade logic of La Belle Lucie, or the stack-building elegance of Sir Tommy. Each rare game develops a distinct planning mode that transfers back to the mainstream games in ways that improve overall patience play. Second, rare variants provide the same session-length flexibility and contemplative quality as mainstream games while offering the genuine novelty of an unfamiliar rule set — which makes them particularly valuable for experienced players whose mainstream game sessions have become routine.
This article covers ten rare solitaire games that are genuinely worth playing: their rules, their strategic character, their approximate difficulty, and what makes each one distinct from the mainstream patience catalogue.
Before exploring rare variants, it helps to establish the mainstream baseline. Klondike (40–45% win rate), Spider (30–70% depending on suit count), FreeCell (80–90%), Pyramid (40–60%), and TriPeaks (75–85%) are the five games that account for the overwhelming majority of solitaire sessions globally. Pyramid and TriPeaks represent the more accessible end of the mainstream catalogue. Everything covered below is structurally distinct from these five games in ways that make each one a genuinely different playing experience rather than a surface variation on a familiar theme. For context on how classic and modern design philosophies differ across the solitaire family, see our classic vs modern solitaire variants guide.
1. Canfield — the casino patience game. Canfield has a direct historical claim to being the most played solitaire game in North America before Klondike achieved that title through the Windows bundle. It was sold as a gambling game in 19th-century American casinos: players bought a deck for one dollar and received fifty cents for each card they moved to the foundations. The rules differ from Klondike in three important ways: the reserve pile (13 cards dealt face-up in a column at the start, all available to play), the foundation ranks (the first card dealt to foundations determines the starting rank for all four suits — not necessarily Ace), and the continuous stock cycling (unlimited passes until no moves remain). These three rule changes produce a game that feels simultaneously more constrained (the variable foundation starting rank limits early moves) and more flexible (the reserve pile and unlimited stock cycling give more options than Klondike's stock). Strategic win rates of 25–35% reflect the genuinely hard nature of the foundation rank constraint. Canfield is the most historically significant rare solitaire game in the North American patience tradition.
2. La Belle Lucie — the fan layout game. Also known as Midnight Oil and The Fan, La Belle Lucie deals all 52 cards face-up into 17 fans of three cards each, with one card left over. Only the top card of each fan is playable; tableau building requires same-suit ascending sequences (the 4 of hearts can only be placed on the 3 of hearts, not on any other 3). Aces, when freed, go directly to foundations. Three full passes through the layout are typically permitted, with one mercy (a free reshuffle of unplaced cards) between each pass. The unique challenge of La Belle Lucie is that its same-suit build rule means the player is always waiting for a specific card of a specific suit — the planning question at every move is which fans to unblock, in what order, to give the most useful cards a clear path to their foundation. Win rates of 30–40% with strategic play make La Belle Lucie a moderately hard game with a distinctive fan-clearing aesthetic that no mainstream variant replicates.
3. Sir Tommy — the simplest complete-information patience game. Sir Tommy deals all 52 cards one at a time from the stock onto any of four discard piles, with each card immediately visible before placement. The player chooses which of the four piles each card goes to. Cards cannot be moved between piles after placement. The win condition is building all four suits Ace to King from the four discard piles onto four foundation piles, playing each card in the correct ascending order. The deceptive simplicity of Sir Tommy conceals a genuine combinatorial challenge: with only four discard piles and 52 cards arriving in random order, placing a card without a plan for when it becomes playable quickly creates piles that block each other. Win rates of 40–55% with careful pile sequencing make Sir Tommy accessible but not trivial. It is the closest thing in the patience family to a pure placement puzzle — no tableau movement, no sequences, just 52 binary pile-assignment decisions with downstream consequences.
4. Osmosis — the suit-ordered discovery game. Osmosis (also called Peek) deals 16 cards face-down into four reserve piles and 36 cards into a stock, with four foundations started by dealing one card face-up to each. Foundation building in Osmosis is unique: cards are added to the second, third, and fourth foundations only if a card of the same rank has already been placed on the foundation immediately above them. A 7 can go on the second foundation only if a 7 is already on the first. An 8 on the third only if an 8 is on the second. This cascading rank dependency creates a strikingly different planning environment from any mainstream variant — the player is not building sequences but managing rank availability across four parallel tracks that unlock each other in a specific order. Win rates of 60–70% make Osmosis one of the more accessible rare variants, and its unique foundation logic makes it one of the most memorable structural departures from the patience mainstream.
5. Grandfather's Clock — the clock-face layout game. Grandfather's Clock deals twelve specific cards face-up in a clock face arrangement — the 9 of hearts at 12 o'clock, the 10 of spades at 1 o'clock, and so on, each specific card at the clock position whose hour number matches its rank (with aces as 1, Jacks as 11, Queens as 12). The remaining 40 cards are dealt into eight tableau columns of five. Tableau building is sequential alternating colour (standard Klondike rule). The win condition is filling each clock position with all four cards of the matching rank in each suit — not a standard four-suit foundation build. The clock-face win condition makes Grandfather's Clock one of the most visually distinctive patience games and gives it a structural goal that players find immediately legible: the clock must be complete. Win rates of 70–80% with strategic play make it one of the more accessible rare games, and its complete-information deal (all cards face-up from the start) removes the luck component entirely.
6. Calculation — the arithmetic patience game. Calculation starts with four foundation cards — one Ace, one 2, one 3, one 4 — and requires the player to build each foundation by its starting number as a skip-count sequence: the Ace foundation adds every card (A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K); the 2 foundation adds every second rank (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, Q, A, 3, 5, 7, 9, J, K); the 3 foundation adds every third (3, 6, 9, Q, 2, 5, 8, J, A, 4, 7, 10, K); the 4 foundation adds every fourth (4, 8, Q, 3, 7, J, 2, 6, 10, A, 5, 9, K). Suits are irrelevant — only rank matters. The 48 remaining cards are dealt one at a time from the stock onto any of four discard waste piles, in any order, with the goal of playing each card to the correct foundation sequence when its rank comes due. Calculation is the most arithmetically demanding patience game in wide documentation: the player must track four independent skip-count sequences simultaneously across 52 cards. Win rates are difficult to estimate reliably because outcomes depend heavily on the player's ability to track the sequences, but 30–50% is a reasonable range for players comfortable with the arithmetic.
7. Gaps (also known as Montana) — the rank-ordering puzzle. Gaps deals all 52 cards face-up in four rows of 13, then removes all four Aces, leaving four gaps. Cards are moved into gaps: a card can move into a gap if it is one rank higher than the card to the gap's left and shares its suit (so the 7 of clubs can fill a gap immediately to the right of the 6 of clubs). Cards of rank King cannot be moved into any gap. The goal is to arrange all four rows as complete same-suit sequences from 2 to King. After each pass, remaining gaps are refilled by removing and reshuffling all cards not in a valid position from the right-hand portion of any row, and new gaps are created. Two or three redeals are typically permitted. Gaps produces one of the most visually satisfying solving experiences in the patience family — watching a row lock into suit-ordered sequence is immediately perceptible — and its movement logic is simple enough to learn in a single game while producing genuine planning depth. Win rates of 40–55% with two redeals.
8. Klondike Turn 3 — the strict stock variant. Technically a variant of the most famous patience game rather than a separate game, Klondike Turn 3 is listed here because it plays substantially differently from Klondike Turn 1 and is genuinely unfamiliar to most digital solitaire players, who learned the game in the Turn 1 format that Microsoft used for Windows 3.0. In strict Turn 3, only three passes through the stock are permitted — draw three cards at a time, play the top card if legal, move to the next group of three if not. The three-pass limit transforms stock management from a planning variable into a rationed resource: every wasted draw in the first pass reduces options in the second, and running out of passes with foundations incomplete is a more common loss condition than in Turn 1. Win rates of 20–25% with strategic play make Turn 3 one of the hardest mainstream single-deck games and one of the closest digital approximations to the difficulty level of the original 19th-century Klondike rules.
9. Agnes Sorel — the Klondike variant with a shared reserve. Agnes Sorel deals a standard seven-column Klondike tableau with one modification: an eighth card is dealt face-up above the layout as a shared reserve. The foundation starting rank is determined by this reserve card — if it is a 7, all four foundations start at 7 and build upward with wrap-around (7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K, A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). After each stock draw, a new reserve card is added. The wrap-around foundation rule and the reserve card mechanic together create a significantly different planning environment from standard Klondike: the foundation target changes with the reserve, wrap-around requires tracking a circular rank order, and the shared reserve card is available to all columns simultaneously. Win rates of 35–45% make Agnes Sorel comparable to standard Klondike in difficulty while offering a notably different feel.
10. Maze — the sequential arrangement puzzle. Maze is one of the most unusual patience games in wide documentation: the win condition is not building foundations but arranging all 52 cards in a specific sequential order. All 52 cards are dealt face-up, then the four Kings are removed, creating four gaps. Cards are moved into gaps: a card can fill a gap if it is one rank lower than the card to the gap's right (in the same suit) or one rank higher than the card to the gap's left (in the same suit). The goal is to produce four complete same-suit rows from Ace to Queen (Kings having been removed). Maze shares Gaps's visual satisfaction of watching rows resolve into order but produces a different planning challenge because both leftward and rightward moves are available simultaneously, creating a more open combinatorial space. Win rates of 50–65% with careful sequencing make Maze one of the more forgiving rare variants and an excellent introduction to the row-arrangement category of patience games.
The ten rare solitaire games above span a wide difficulty range. For players looking for the most accessible entry point into rare patience games: Grandfather's Clock (70–80%), Osmosis (60–70%), and Maze (50–65%) offer the highest win rates and the most clearly legible planning logic. All three have complete or near-complete information deals that remove the hidden-card luck component from the mainstream games.
For players who want a genuine challenge comparable to Spider 2-Suit or harder: La Belle Lucie (30–40%), Canfield (25–35%), and strict Klondike Turn 3 (20–25%) offer win rates in the range of the hardest mainstream variants, with structural mechanics that develop specific planning habits — fan unblocking in La Belle Lucie, stock rationing in Turn 3, foundation rank tracking in Canfield — that the mainstream games do not require.
For players interested in pure puzzle logic without sequence-building: Sir Tommy, Calculation, Gaps, and Maze all eliminate or minimise the sequence-building mechanic in favour of placement, arrangement, or arithmetic logic. These four games are the most structurally distinct from the mainstream patience family and develop planning skills that transfer back to the mainstream in unexpected ways — Sir Tommy's pile-sequencing logic improves stock management in Klondike; Calculation's arithmetic tracking improves foundation balance judgements across all variants.
For players whose access to rare patience games has been limited by digital platform catalogues, the most practical resource is a platform with the complete historical patience catalogue — not just the five mainstream games but the full range including Canfield, La Belle Lucie, Sir Tommy, Osmosis, Gaps, and their relatives. onlinesolitairefree.com offers the broadest available catalogue of both mainstream and rare variants free without download or account, with consistent rule implementations across all games. For the comparison between physical and online play for rare variants specifically — where physical play requires knowing the rule set in advance and online play provides automatic rule enforcement — see our online vs physical solitaire guide.
Most rare solitaire games share two habits with the mainstream patience family: exhaust all available moves before drawing new cards, and plan several moves ahead at every decision point rather than responding reactively to the current board state. Beyond these universal habits, rare games each have a specific mechanic that determines most of the strategic depth: fan unblocking in La Belle Lucie, pile sequencing in Sir Tommy, rank cascade management in Osmosis, stock rationing in Canfield and Klondike Turn 3, and row-gap sequencing in Gaps and Maze. Identifying the specific mechanic of a rare game — what the game is actually about structurally, beneath the rules — is the fastest way to develop productive strategic habits in an unfamiliar variant. The same analytical approach that identifies "suit purity" as the central mechanic of Spider identifies "foundation rank cascade" as the central mechanic of Osmosis and "pile sequencing" as the central mechanic of Sir Tommy.
Among the ten rare variants covered in this article, Grandfather's Clock (70–80% win rate) is the most accessible — complete information deal, familiar alternating-colour tableau build, and a visually clear win condition make it the most beginner-friendly rare game in the patience catalogue. Osmosis (60–70%) and Maze (50–65%) follow as the next most accessible. The rarest variants covered here — La Belle Lucie, Canfield, and strict Klondike Turn 3 — have win rates in the 20–40% range that make them genuinely difficult games requiring specific strategic habits to win consistently. For comparison with mainstream variant win rates, our solitaire probability guide covers the full win rate table.
No. Like mainstream patience variants, rare solitaire games have proportions of mathematically unwinnable deals — card arrangements from which no legal sequence of moves reaches the win condition regardless of strategy. The proportion varies by game structural properties: complete-information games with flexible staging (like Grandfather's Clock) tend toward higher solvability, while restricted-stock games with limited passes (like Canfield and Klondike Turn 3) tend toward lower solvability. The practical working assumption for rare variants — as for mainstream ones — is that any loss at a win rate below 50% should be assumed possibly to be a deal loss rather than necessarily a skill loss, while losses at win rates above 70% are more likely to be skill losses traceable to specific planning decisions.