Why a window box?

Solitaire is a quiet game. You sit, you sort, and slowly a messy table turns into four neat piles. We wanted that slow progress to show. Four stacks of cards in a corner don’t look like much.

So the four piles became flower pots on a window sill. Each card you add makes that suit’s plant grow a little, with 13 stages for 13 cards. Finish a suit from Ace to King and it blooms. Clear the whole deck and the window box is full: roses, marigolds, clover and lavender, all out at once.

A bit of real patience history

Card games for one player seem to have started in northern Europe toward the end of the 1700s. The earliest known description is in a German games book, in its 1783 edition, where the game is called Patience. A German book from 1793 even describes patience as a contest between two players. It was popular in France by the early 1800s, and the first English-language collections of patience games came out in the 1860s.

The game most people now call solitaire is Klondike. Its earliest known rules appear in the 1907 edition of Hoyle’s Games. Nobody is sure where the name comes from. Some writers link it to the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada’s Yukon in the late 1890s, but there is no real evidence for that.

Microsoft put Solitaire into Windows 3.0 in 1990. A summer intern, Wes Cherry, wrote it in 1988, and most of the card art was by the designer Susan Kare. Dragging cards around helped a lot of people get used to a mouse. The exact chance of winning a random deal is still unknown. The mathematician Persi Diaconis called that “one of the embarrassments of applied probability.” So we had a computer solver play every deal on our Winnable list first. All 360 can be won with Draw 1.

The four pots

• Hearts grow roses. Three red roses open when the King goes in.
• Diamonds grow marigolds. Feathery leaves, then orange flowers.
• Clubs grow clover. Look for the four-leaf one when it blooms.
• Spades grow lavender. Thin stems, then purple spikes.

How to play

• Pick Draw 1 (easier) or Draw 3 (harder) and deal. Your choice is remembered.
• Build each suit in its own pot, from Ace up to King.
• In the seven columns, stack cards down in alternating colors, like a red 6 on a black 7. You can move a whole run at once.
• Only a King can go into an empty column.
• Tap the deck to draw. When it runs out, tap it again to turn the pile over, as many times as you like.
• Tap a card to send it to the best spot, or drag it where you want it.
• Undo as often as you like. When every card is face up, tap Finish.
• Games played, games won and your best time save on this device.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Free the face-down cards first. Every hidden card you turn over gives you more choices. Given two moves, pick the one that uncovers a card.

Empty a column only when a King is waiting. Only a King can use an empty column, so there’s no rush to clear one.

Don’t hurry middle cards into the pots. Aces and 2s are always safe to send up. A black 7 might still be needed in a column to hold a red 6. Undo is there if you change your mind.

Start with Draw 1. Draw 3 turns over three cards at a time and only the top one can be played, so it’s much harder. Draw 1 with Winnable deals on means every game can be won.

Your turn

The deck is shuffled. Deal your first hand at the top of this page and see if you can get the whole window box to bloom.