Sir Tommy Solitaire

Sir Tommy, also known as Old Patience, is one of the oldest recorded patience games ever documented. For much of the nineteenth century, "Old Patience" was the dominant form of solitaire in the English-speaking world. It appeared in newspaper columns and card game manuals as the game people meant when they said they were playing patience.

The mechanics are strikingly simple. A single deck deals one card at a time from the stock. Aces go directly to a foundation pile. All other cards go face-up onto one of four tableau waste piles — you choose which pile each card goes to. That choice is the entire game.

Cards cannot move between piles. There is no redeal. The only playable surface on each pile is its top card, which can advance to a foundation when the sequence calls for it. Every other placement is permanent.

This irreversibility is the heart of Sir Tommy. Place a King too early on a pile and it may permanently bury cards you need. Pile management is everything — four piles, fifty-two decisions, no take-backs.

Careful play wins a meaningful fraction of games. Careless play loses nearly all of them. The gap between random play and good play is unusually large for a game with so few moving parts.

Sir Tommy's descendants include Calculation, which changes the foundation building sequences, and many other patience variants built on the same mechanic of committing cards to permanent piles. Understanding Sir Tommy is understanding the root of an entire family of patience games.

1. Shuffle a standard 52-card deck. Set aside space for four foundation piles and four tableau waste piles. All begin empty.
2. Turn cards from the stock one at a time.
3. When an Ace appears, place it immediately on an empty foundation pile. Aces are the only cards that may start a foundation.
4. Once an Ace is on a foundation, the 2 of any suit may be placed on it when it appears, then the 3, and so on through the King. Foundations build in ascending rank regardless of suit — any suit's 2 may go on any foundation's Ace.
5. Any card not playable to a foundation must go face-up on one of the four tableau waste piles. You choose which pile. There is no restriction — this freedom is the game's entire strategic space.

Only the top card of each tableau pile is available for play. If a top card is next in any foundation's sequence, move it there. Play as many foundation moves as possible before turning the next stock card.

Cards cannot move between tableau piles under any circumstances. Empty piles may be filled with any card from the stock. There is no redeal once the stock is exhausted.

The game is won when all 52 cards are on the four foundations. The game is lost when the stock runs out and no more foundation moves can be made.

Sir Tommy has a history stretching further back than almost any other documented patience game. Under the name "Old Patience," it was the predominant form of patience in England and America throughout much of the nineteenth century. Card game books from the mid-1800s describe it as the standard game — the one you played when you played solitaire — before an explosion of named variants fragmented the genre in the latter half of the century.

The shift from "Old Patience" to "Sir Tommy" reflects the Victorian fashion of naming patience games after military figures, royalty, and notable personalities. The exact origin of the "Sir Tommy" name is unclear, but it appears consistently in card game manuals from the 1880s onward with the same rules as the earlier "Old Patience."

The alternative name "Numerica" reflects the game's purely numerical character — suit is irrelevant, and only rank matters for both tableau placement and foundation building. This makes it one of the very few classic patience games where the four suits play no mechanical role at all.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Sir Tommy's dominance had faded as games like Klondike and Canfield captured public attention. But it persisted in card game compendiums as a foundational game, often placed first in lists as an introduction to the patience family.

• Anticipate what the foundations need next. Before placing any card, ask which ranks the foundations will need soon and which pile placement least obstructs reaching them.
• Don't bury low cards under high ones. Avoid placing Kings, Queens, or Jacks on piles that contain lower cards still needed. A 5 buried under a King may be unreachable when the foundations reach rank 4 — and that alone can lose the game.
• Spread cards across all four piles. Loading one or two piles early creates a dead pile. Its top card may never match what the foundations need, locking everything beneath it.
• Keep one pile as a sacrifice pile. High cards dealt well before the foundations reach that rank have nowhere sensible to go. Accept this and route them to a designated pile. Minimizing damage on unavoidable bad placements is itself a skill.
• Aim for different rank clusters across piles. One pile trending low, one mid, one high gives the best spread of accessible cards as foundations advance through the ranks.