← Blog · 6 min read · Updated May 2026
The Origin of Solitaire: From Napoleon to Bill Gates
Solitaire — or "patience," as much of the world still calls it — looks eternal. The cards are old. The layout has a Victorian air. Surely people have been playing this game forever. They have not. Solitaire as a genre is younger than the steam engine, and its global rise is the story of three moments: 18th-century French parlors, Napoleon in exile, and Microsoft bundling Klondike with Windows 3.0 in 1990.
The First Records
The earliest published solitaire references appear in German card-game compilations of the late 1700s. These weren't recreational games — they were used as a form of fortune-telling, with the outcome of a "patience" layout interpreted as a yes/no answer to a question. The shift to pure recreation came in early 19th-century France, where patience games became a fashionable parlor diversion among the aristocracy.
Napoleon at St. Helena
The most famous early adopter was Napoleon Bonaparte. Exiled on the island of St. Helena from 1815 until his death in 1821, Napoleon reportedly played solitaire daily as a way to pass the long, dull hours. Several specific variants — most famously "Napoleon at St. Helena," which is essentially what we now call Forty Thieves — are named for the period.
The Napoleon connection gave solitaire cachet across Europe. By the 1850s patience games appeared in published card-game manuals throughout Britain, Germany, France, and Russia.
The Klondike Gold Rush
The version most of the world now plays — Klondike — gets its name from the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99. Prospectors in the Yukon Territory of northwestern Canada played the game during the long northern winters when the ground was frozen and there was little else to do.
Whether the Klondike specific ruleset was invented during the gold rush or just popularized there is unclear. Similar games appear in earlier European compilations under names like "Canfield" and "Fascination." What's certain is that Klondike entered American card-game culture through the gold-rush mining camps and never left.
The Casino Era
In the late 19th century, the entrepreneur Richard A. Canfield ran a famous casino in Saratoga Springs, New York, where a variant of Klondike was sold to gamblers: a player would pay $52 (one dollar per card) for the right to play a hand and would receive $5 for each card sent to the foundation. Most players lost money. The variant — Canfield Solitaire, also called Demon Patience — survives to this day.
The Microsoft Moment
Solitaire would have remained a quiet hobby played by retirees and bored travelers if not for a single business decision at Microsoft in 1989. The company was preparing Windows 3.0 — its first commercially successful GUI — and an intern named Wes Cherry wrote Klondike Solitaire as a project to teach office workers how to use a mouse. Microsoft executives thought it was charming and bundled it with the operating system.
Within a year Klondike was the most-played computer game in the world. By 1992 Microsoft added FreeCell, designed by Jim Horne, partly to demonstrate Windows 3.1's new 256-color graphics. Spider followed in 1998. Pyramid, TriPeaks, and several others appeared in Microsoft Entertainment Pack compilations.
Wes Cherry famously received no royalties for Klondike, despite it becoming the most-played computer game in history. He once joked that he was paid in "exposure."
The Internet Era
When the web matured in the late 1990s, solitaire migrated online. Sites like solitaire.com, solitaire-bliss.com, and dozens of others made browser-based play available everywhere. Mobile apps in the 2010s added daily challenges, leaderboards, and the now-ubiquitous "watch an ad to continue" mechanic — for better and worse.
What's Next
Solitaire today is a stable genre. The big games — Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid, TriPeaks — have settled into their canonical rulesets. New mechanics emerge occasionally (daily challenges, cooperative leaderboards, theme variants), but the core experience hasn't changed meaningfully in fifty years. The puzzle still works.
Try any variant on our homepage. The game you already know is older than the country it's named after, but still feels like a deal of cards on a quiet evening — because that's all it ever was.