Solitaire

Does the most common American form of solitaire (seven piles, red on black, comes with Windows) have an official name? “Solitaire,” of course, is a generic term referring to any game you play by yourself. For some reason I always thought the real name of this game was “Patience,” but when I looked it up, it turned out that “Patience” was also a generic (British) term for several different games.

Klondike.

When I was taught the game as a child, it was called “Canfield.”

Doesn’t Hoyle cover all this?

My copy of Hoyle’s (82nd printing - 1983)list 20 variants of Solitaire. I learned to play as per the rules Windows’ Solitaire uses by default. Hoyle’s description of the Klondike variant is Windows’ version w/the draw one (instead of three) and Vegas (i.e., you can only go through the undealt remainder of the deck once) options. The Windows default isn’t included in my copy of Hoyle’s

“patience” and “réussite” (literally success or, I guess, the fact that you have succeeded in completing the game) are used in French.

Ugh. It’s not Canfield, it’s Klondike. Canfield is a different, even more evil solitaire game. You can find the rules for (and play) many different games here:

http://www.games.demo.ru/solit.html