Why is it called Klondike solitaire?
The solitaire almost everyone means when they say "solitaire" is named after the Klondike — the gold-rush region of Canada's Yukon that drew tens of thousands of prospectors north in the late 1890s. How a card game picked up a gold miner's name, conquered a century, and ended up on every computer on Earth is a genuinely good story.
The gold-rush answer
The game we now call Klondike surfaced in North America in the late 19th century, right around the Klondike gold rush of 1896–1899. The popular telling is that prospectors played it through the long, dark Yukon winters — a one-player game being the practical choice when your cabin-mate is sick of you — and the name stuck to the game the way "Klondike" stuck to anything associated with that era's fever for gold.
Honesty compels a caveat: nobody wrote the christening down. The miner story is plausible and beloved, but the paper trail really begins in early 20th-century card-game books, where the rules appear under the name Klondike (and, confusingly, sometimes Canfield — in Britain, "Canfield" still often means Klondike, while in America Canfield is a different, harder game named after the casino owner Richard Canfield). What's certain: by the early 1900s the name, and the game, were everywhere.
Where did solitaire itself come from?
Solitaire is much older than its most famous variant. Single-player card games — "patience" games, as most of the world still calls them — show up in European sources in the late 1700s, with the first known collections of patience rules printed in Germany in the early 1800s. The pastime swept fashionable Europe; Napoleon is said to have played patience in exile (another story better documented in legend than in ledger). English-language rulebooks followed, most famously Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience in the 1870s, which helped make patience a respectable parlor fixture in Britain and America.
Out of that crowded family of games — hundreds of variants, from Spider to FreeCell's ancestors — Klondike emerged as America's favorite. When Americans said "solitaire," they increasingly meant this one game: seven columns, build down alternating colors, Aces to the foundations. (If that's the game you're after today, that's exactly the basic solitaire we build.)
The Microsoft era: solitaire teaches the world to drag and drop
Then came the moment that turned a popular card game into arguably the most-played computer game in history. In 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0 with a free copy of Klondike — Microsoft Solitaire — written by a summer intern named Wes Cherry (who famously received no royalties). The card backs were drawn by Susan Kare, the designer behind the original Macintosh icons. Microsoft's stated purpose was almost sneaky: solitaire existed partly to teach a generation of office workers how to use a mouse, soothing them into drag-and-drop one red-seven-on-a-black-eight at a time.
It worked beyond anyone's ambitions. For decades, solitaire was simply there on hundreds of millions of machines — the default idle pleasure of the office age, the game your parents played, the cascading-cards victory animation burned into collective memory. If the word "solitaire" makes you feel something, it's probably this version you're feeling.
A century, one set of rules
Here's the remarkable part: through the gold rush, the parlor era, and the PC revolution, the game barely changed. The Klondike a Yukon prospector dealt on a cabin table is move-for-move the game an intern coded in 1990 and the game you can deal in your browser right now. Few games of any kind have run a century on the same rules. There's a reason: the design is close to perfect — a five-minute ritual of order emerging from shuffle, with just enough luck to forgive you and just enough skill to reward you.
From the kitchen table to your pocket
We named our game The Original Solitaire+ as a promise about that lineage: the original game, treated with respect — by a team that's been making mobile solitaire since 2003, and that grew up on the Microsoft classic like everybody else. The classic core stays classic (the rules haven't changed; here they are). The one thing we added is the first real innovation the game has seen in a long time: the patent-pending Peek button, which finally lets you do on a screen what every kitchen-table player has always done with a real deck — take a look before you commit.
A hundred and some years in, the game's still perfect for a dark winter evening. Deal a hand :)