By Online Solitaire Free Editorial Team · Editorial Standards
Learn about patience card games. Discover strategies, tips, and guides for playing free solitaire games online.
If you have ever searched for solitaire games in Britain, Germany, France, or most of continental Europe, you will have encountered the word "Patience" used interchangeably with "Solitaire." These two words describe the same family of single-player card games. The difference is purely geographic and linguistic: "Solitaire" is the dominant term in North America and increasingly in global online contexts, while "Patience" is the traditional term across most of Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Scandinavia.
The name "Patience" predates "Solitaire" as an established English-language term for these games. It entered the English language from French — the French word "patience" means both the quality of calm endurance and the category of single-player card games — and became the standard British term during the 19th century when patience card games spread through Victorian society. "Solitaire" is also French in origin, derived from the Latin "solitarius" meaning alone or solitary, and arrived as the dominant North American term through a slightly different linguistic pathway, picking up its card game meaning from French-Canadian and American English usage during the same era.
Both names capture something true about the games they describe. "Patience" reflects the quality the games were believed to develop: the ability to sit with uncertainty, to work methodically through a problem that may not resolve favourably, and to accept the outcome with equanimity. "Solitaire" reflects the structural fact that makes the games distinctive: they are played alone, without partners, opponents, or a social context. Understanding why patience card games acquired both names — and what those names reveal about how the games were understood across different cultures — gives a richer picture of why the patience tradition has endured for more than two centuries.
For the full story of how solitaire spread from 18th-century northern Europe to the most played card game genre in the world, see our history of solitaire.
Despite the hundreds of distinct patience card game variants that exist, all of them share a common structural framework. Understanding this framework explains both why the games are called patience and why learning one patience game makes every subsequent game easier to pick up.
Every patience game begins with a deal — cards distributed according to a specific layout that defines the starting position. The deal is the luck component of patience games: the specific arrangement of cards in the starting layout is random and outside the player's control. What the player controls is everything that happens after the deal: the sequence of moves that attempts to transform the starting layout into the win condition.
The win condition in most patience games is building all cards onto foundation piles — usually four piles, one per suit, built from Ace to King in ascending order. The tableau is the main playing area where sequences are built and reorganised to make progress toward the foundations. Some patience games add a stock — a reserve of undealt or redrawn cards that can be accessed during play — and some, like FreeCell, add free cells as temporary holding spaces. The specific rules governing which cards can be placed where in the tableau, how the stock is accessed, and what constitutes a valid sequence vary enormously between variants, which is why the patience family contains games ranging from beginner-accessible to extremely difficult.
The patience quality the games develop is most visible in the gap between deal and outcome. After the starting layout is dealt, the path to a win — if one exists — must be constructed move by move through planning, evaluation, and iterative adjustment. This process of working through a problem of unknown solvability with only partial information available at each step is precisely the cognitive and emotional exercise that gave the games their European name. You cannot hurry a patience game. You can only work through it methodically and accept that some deals will not resolve favourably regardless of effort — a lesson that players across two and a half centuries have found worth practising.
Because all patience card games share the same structural framework, several strategic habits improve win rates across the entire family rather than in any one variant specifically. These are the patience card game rules of thumb that experienced players carry from game to game.
Always exhaust tableau moves before drawing from the stock. The stock is a safety net, not a first resort. Every card drawn from the stock without checking whether a tableau move is available wastes information and reduces future options. This discipline — scan all tableau column tops before every stock draw — is the single habit that produces the largest win rate improvement across all patience variants that include a stock, from Klondike to TriPeaks to Golf.
Prioritise moves that create new information. In patience games with face-down cards — Klondike, Spider, Yukon — every move that uncovers a face-down card is more valuable than a move that merely rearranges face-up cards. New information expands planning options; rearranging known cards without uncovering anything new produces local improvements that often create downstream blockages. This principle applies across all variants with hidden cards and is the most reliable way to distinguish productive from unproductive moves.
Keep all foundation suits advancing in parallel. The temptation in most patience games is to build one suit ahead of the others when its cards are accessible. This produces an imbalanced board where the advanced suit's higher cards are no longer available as stepping stones in tableau sequences. Keeping all four suits within two or three ranks of each other maintains maximum flexibility and prevents the specific type of endgame stuck position that ends most patience games that reach the final quarter with imbalanced foundations.
Think several moves ahead before committing to any action. Patience is not a reactive game — it is a planning game. The quality of patience that the name describes is most directly expressed in the willingness to pause before every move, evaluate the downstream consequences of available options, and choose the move that creates the most future flexibility rather than the most immediate progress. This planning habit is the clearest differentiator between casual and strategic patience play in every variant from beginner-accessible to expert-level.
Use undo to learn, not just to correct mistakes. In online patience games, the undo function is the most underused learning tool available. Strategic players use undo speculatively — executing a move, evaluating the result, undoing, comparing an alternative — to build the forward-planning habit faster than experience alone allows. Players who use undo only to correct obvious errors miss most of its value as a planning development tool.
Moving cards to the foundation too early. Foundation moves feel like progress — and in most cases they are — but in patience card games, a card on the foundation is no longer available as a tableau stepping stone. Moving a 7 to the foundation before the 6 of the same colour in the opposite suit is also foundationed can block a critical sequence several moves later. The two-colour check — verify that the same-rank card of the opposite colour is also foundationed or immediately accessible before committing any mid-rank card — prevents the most common version of this mistake across Klondike, FreeCell, and Spider alike.
Drawing from the stock without scanning the tableau first. This is the reactive habit that most directly separates casual from strategic play. Stock-first players miss available tableau moves, which means they draw cards they don't need while the cards they do need remain buried beneath stock layers that accumulate unnecessarily. Every stock draw should be preceded by a full tableau scan — this single discipline routinely doubles win rates in Klondike and produces significant improvements across all stock-using variants.
Building long tableau sequences without a plan for emptying a column. Empty columns — in FreeCell, in Spider, in Klondike when all cards in a column are moved — are among the most valuable resources in patience card games. They provide the flexibility to reorganise blocked sequences and are the prerequisite for large sequence moves in games with movement capacity formulas. Players who build long sequences without tracking whether any column will empty in the near future consistently run out of the flexibility needed to resolve the endgame.
Treating all losses as skill failures. Every patience game variant has a proportion of mathematically unwinnable deals — from near-zero in FreeCell to 20–40% in Pyramid. A player who loses a game due to an unwinnable deal has not made a strategic error — they have encountered normal variance. Treating all losses as improvable is demoralising and inaccurate; separating skill losses from deal losses produces accurate self-assessment and more targeted improvement. For detailed solvability statistics across major variants, see our FreeCell solvability guide.
The full patience card game family is available to play free at onlinesolitairefree.com with no download or account required. Here is a guide to the best games to start with depending on your goals.
For beginners who want to win consistently: Start with FreeCell. Its complete information — all 52 cards face-up from the first deal — makes every loss a direct lesson in planning and produces faster improvement than any hidden-information variant. Win rates of 80–90% with strategic play make it the clearest recommendation for players whose primary goal is a high win rate. Alternatively, TriPeaks Solitaire offers 75–85% win rates with a simpler chain-building mechanic that resolves in shorter sessions.
For players who know Klondike and want a new challenge: Pyramid Solitaire introduces a completely different structural mechanic — pairing cards that sum to 13 across an overlapping pyramid layout — that develops different planning skills than the sequence-building variants. Its 40–60% win rate with strategic play is comparable to Klondike Turn 1, but the mechanics are different enough to feel genuinely fresh.
For players who want to explore the breadth of the patience family: The historical catalogue of patience card game variants covers everything from the simple rank-adjacency chains of Golf and TriPeaks to the deep planning demands of Spider 4-Suit and Forty Thieves. Each game in the family develops and rewards a distinct set of planning habits, and the patience skills built in one variant transfer meaningfully to others. The entire collection is available at onlinesolitairefree.com.
The patience card game family is larger and more varied than most players realise. Beyond the most widely played variants — Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, Pyramid — there are dozens of distinct patience games with different structures, difficulty levels, and strategic demands worth exploring.
Forty Thieves uses two full decks across ten tableau columns with same-suit building and a non-recyclable stock, producing one of the most challenging patience experiences available — a win rate of 20–35% even with strategic play makes it the recommended next step for players who have mastered Spider 2-Suit and want a harder challenge. Scorpion combines Yukon's free movement rule with Spider's same-suit completion goal in a 7-column layout that produces 45–55% win rates with careful play. Wasp extends Scorpion with face-down cards in all columns for an additional difficulty step.
For players interested in the complete taxonomy of patience card games — their histories, win rates, strategic demands, and relationships to each other — the history of solitaire provides the broader context, and the game pages at onlinesolitairefree.com cover rules and strategy for every major variant in the collection.
There is no gameplay difference between Solitaire and Patience — both words refer to the same family of single-player card games. The difference is linguistic and geographic. "Patience" is the traditional term in Britain, Germany, France, and most of Europe, derived from the French word for the quality of calm endurance. "Solitaire" is the dominant term in North America, derived from the French word for alone or solitary. Both names describe the same games. When you search for patience card games in a British context or solitaire games in an American one, you are looking for the same thing.
FreeCell is the easiest mainstream patience card game to win consistently, with a win rate of 80–90% with strategic play and fewer than one deal in 4,000 being mathematically unsolvable. TriPeaks follows at 75–85%, making it the easiest layout-clearing variant. For players who specifically want to improve at patience card games, FreeCell's complete information — all cards visible from the first deal — makes every loss a direct planning lesson and produces faster improvement than hidden-information variants like Klondike. For a full ranked comparison of patience game win rates, see our solitaire win rates guide.
No patience card game variant has a 100% solvability rate, but they vary enormously in what proportion of deals are mathematically unwinnable. FreeCell is closest to universal solvability at approximately 99.999% — fewer than 8 deals in the first 32,000 numbered games are unsolvable. Klondike Turn 1 has an estimated 9–21% unsolvable rate. Pyramid has 20–40%. The existence of unwinnable deals is a structural property of patience card games, not a reflection of player skill, and recognising it is part of developing an accurate understanding of what patience card game strategy can and cannot achieve.