Klondike Solitaire — a brief history

Klondike Solitaire is named for a stretch of frozen Yukon riverbank where, in 1896, a gold rush briefly turned a remote subarctic outpost into the most famous boomtown in North America. The card game predates the rush by a century, but the name stuck. A hundred years later, Microsoft put Klondike on every Windows PC and made it, by some distance, the most-played card game in history. This is the short version of how that happened.

The name and the gold rush

The Klondike Gold Rush began on August 16, 1896, when George Carmack and his companions Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie discovered gold on Bonanza Creek in Canada’s Yukon Territory. News reached San Francisco and Seattle the following summer, and roughly 100,000 prospectors set out for the Yukon over the next two years. Only about a third of them made it. By 1898, Dawson City had grown from nothing into a boomtown of some 17,000 people, most living in tents through the subarctic winter.

The card game we now call Klondike is older than the rush, but the name attached during this era. Stories of miners playing solitaire by lamplight in long Yukon nights are part of what gave the game its identity. Whether those stories are entirely accurate or not, the association of game and place became permanent: Klondike, the variant of patience that came to define the genre.

Earlier solitaire origins

Solitaire games are older than the Klondike Gold Rush by more than a century. The first written reference to a single-player card game appears in a 1783 German book describing a game called Patience. By the early 1800s, patience games were a respectable pastime in French society. The oldest known collection of patience games was published in Russia in 1826, with German and French collections following soon after.

The geographic origin is most often traced to Northern Europe — Germany, Scandinavia, the Baltic — in the second half of the 18th century. Early players sometimes used the games for cartomancy, the practice of reading fortunes from cards. By the time the first English-language patience collections appeared in the 1860s, dozens of variants existed. Klondike was one of many. What set it apart was what came next.

Microsoft and the computer era

Microsoft released Windows 3.0 on May 22, 1990, with a small game called Solitaire bundled in. The game was Klondike. It had been written in the summer of 1988 by Wes Cherry, an intern at Microsoft, in his spare time. The card deck was designed by Susan Kare, the graphic designer responsible for the original Macintosh icons.

Microsoft kept Solitaire in Windows 3.0 for two reasons, both reasonable. The first was that the game soothed users intimidated by a new graphical operating system. Computers in 1990 were still text-based for most people, and the idea of moving a pointer with a mouse felt foreign. The second was that Solitaire turned out to be the perfect mouse tutorial. Dragging a card teaches drag-and-drop. Clicking the stock pile teaches single-clicking. Double-clicking a card to send it to a foundation teaches double-clicking.

Brad Silverberg, then Vice President of Windows, recognized the game’s training value and approved its inclusion. The decision turned out to be one of the most consequential in the history of software. Windows 3.0 shipped to millions of users. Solitaire shipped with every copy. Klondike became, almost overnight, the most-played card game in the world.

For the next twenty-two years, every new Windows release included Solitaire. The game became an office-procrastination cliché and a regular fixture in cartoons, novels, and stand-up routines about office life. When Windows 8 shipped in October 2012 without Solitaire pre-installed, the backlash was sharp enough that Microsoft released a separate Microsoft Solitaire Collection app on the Windows Store the same month. Windows 10, in 2015, restored Solitaire to its default position.

Klondike today

The Microsoft Solitaire Collection is now available on Windows, iOS, and Android. It bundles Klondike, Spider, FreeCell, TriPeaks, and Pyramid, and Microsoft estimates it as the most-played card game in history — a claim that is at least plausible, given thirty-five years of distribution with every Windows release.

Hundreds of patience variants exist, and the variants article covers five of the most popular. Klondike remains the variant most people mean when they say “solitaire”. The rules are accessible, the games are short, and the satisfaction of clearing a deck has not changed since 1990 — or, arguably, since 1783.

Why we built this

We built this site for people who grew up playing Klondike on a beige-cased PC and want it accessible again. If that describes you, play Klondike and see if a hand still feels like it did. If you have not played in years, the rules have not changed, and a quick refresher is in the rules article.