By Online Solitaire Free Editorial Team · Editorial Standards
Solitaire's spread across 18th- and 19th-century Europe was rapid and broad. From German game books to French royal courts, English parlors to Russian winter nights, the game found a home in every culture it touched.
By the early 1800s, solitaire — known as patience in most of Europe — was being played in nearly every European country with a literate, card-playing population. Its spread was unusually fast for a pre-industrial game. Within a few decades it moved from obscure German game books to Russian royal courts, French salons, and English parlors. Here is how it traveled.
The earliest known written description of patience-style card games appears in a 1783 German publication called Das neue königliche L'Hombre-Spiel. The book listed several solitaire variants alongside multiplayer card games, suggesting the genre was already familiar to German readers. Germany's strong tradition of game books and printed instructions helped the rules of patience travel further than they could have through word of mouth alone.
In France the game took the name réussite, meaning "success" — a reference to the satisfying feeling of completing a deal. French salons of the late 18th and early 19th centuries adopted patience as both private entertainment and a topic of discussion. Some accounts suggest that French aristocrats during the turbulent years of the Revolution found in patience a quiet, controllable activity in an uncontrollable time. Whether or not that is romanticized, the game became firmly established in French card culture.
England embraced patience in the early 19th century and never let go. The game became a fixture of Victorian parlor life, played by women and men in private homes during quiet evenings. Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience, published in 1870, was a runaway success and went through multiple editions. It documented dozens of patience variants, many of which are still played today. England arguably did more than any other country to systematize the game and pass it down.
Russia took patience seriously, especially during the long winters when indoor entertainment was at a premium. The game appeared in Russian aristocratic households throughout the 19th century. It famously appears in the works of Tolstoy and Pushkin, where characters play patience during moments of waiting, anxiety, or quiet reflection. Russian variants include layouts that are still recognized today as distinctively Eastern European.
In Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, patience became a popular companion to the dark winter months. Swedish players called it kabal, a name inherited from German with a meaning closer to "scheme" or "plot" — capturing the puzzle aspect of the game. Across Scandinavia, patience was associated with quiet evenings by the fire, often played alongside reading or conversation.
Patience required almost nothing to play: a deck of cards, a flat surface, and a quiet hour. Cards were already cheap and widely available across Europe by the late 1700s. The rules of basic patience could be explained in a single page of a game book and learned in five minutes. Once a household knew the basic rules, variations were easy to invent. This combination of low cost and high adaptability let the game cross borders faster than most cultural products of its era.
Several famous historical figures became associated with patience, which only added to its appeal. Napoleon Bonaparte played extensively during his exile on Saint Helena. Queen Victoria was a known player. Various Russian tsars and their families played in long winter evenings. These connections gave the game an aura of sophistication and quiet contemplation that drew even more players to it.
The European patience tradition is the direct ancestor of today's digital solitaire. Klondike — the version Microsoft made famous — descends from European patience layouts dating to the 19th century. When you play Spider, FreeCell, or Pyramid today, you are playing variants whose roots run back through 200 years of European card game history. The game changed names and platforms; the underlying activity is the same one Cadogan documented in 1870.