Solitaire overview

Here is a brief description of what solitaire means.
Solitaire card games or games of patience, as they used to be known, is the category of games played with one or more card decks and which objective is to move all the cards from one determined display to one pile or piles. Playing solitaire has with out doubt its uses. For example playing a solitaire game will keep you company during sleepless nights. For an stressed or worried mind it can be of great ease to relax by playing one or two games of solitaire.

Solitaire games, also known as Patience in Britain, are card games for a single player. Does not exist a precise history of solitaires, but it is probable that solitaires are been born with the card games. The word solitaire is of french origin, and it means patience. The first book on the argument comes printed in 1870. It was Illustrated Games of Patience by lady Adelaide Cadogan, containing 25 games, reprinted many times.

Some historical facts about solitaire card games: it is said that one of the first solitaire games to be invented is "Sir Tommy", which was born at the beginning of the nineteenth century or maybe earlier. "Salic Law" gives its name to the fact that the Queens are excluded from active participation in the game. There are solitaires related to some historical characters, such as "Precedence", which was played by French King Henri V; "St Helena", invented to relief Napoleon Bonaparte's tedium or "Roosevelt's Favorite" otherwise known as "Spider" said to be played by President Roosevelt. The "Canfield" solitaire is said to be invented by the owner of a casino in Saratoga which offered the player of the game five dollars for each he could move to the foundation piles.

Nowadays, the most famous solitaire of them all is "Klondike", which takes its name due to the disposition of the cards on the tableau, which reminds the form of the "Klondike" mountain.

In the U.S. Mrs. E.D. Cheney published the successive year the book Patience. The publishing house Dick & Fitzgerald in New York published in 1883 a series of books dedicated to solitaire games ("Dick's Games of Patience") and a second series was published in 1898. In the 1890's a great populariser of the game was Miss Whitemore Jones, whose 5 volumes on solitaires went reprint for thirty years.