Solitaire games
Patience games are the only card games designed to be played alone, and the good ones are puzzles wearing a card game’s clothes.
The family is enormous — several hundred documented variants — but they are all built from the same four parts. There is a tableau you manipulate, one or more foundations you are trying to fill, usually a stock of undealt cards to draw from, and a set of rules about which card may sit on which. Change any one of those and you get a different game with a completely different character.
What actually distinguishes them is how much the deal decides for you. Klondike hides more than half the pack face down, so a proportion of deals cannot be won no matter how well you play; the skill lies in recognising which cards to free first and when a move closes a door. FreeCell deals everything face up, which means almost every hand is solvable and any loss is genuinely your own — it is the closest the family comes to a pure puzzle. Spider sits between the two, and Scorpion asks you to untangle columns rather than build them.
Then there are the games that are frankly hostile. Canfield gives you a thirteen-card reserve you cannot see into and a single starting card per foundation; historically it was played as a casino game precisely because the house expected you to lose. Crescent hands you two full decks and sixteen piles and rations your rescues. Pyramid is not really a building game at all — it is arithmetic, pairing cards to thirteen until the structure collapses.
If you are new to the family, start with FreeCell rather than Klondike. Knowing that a deal is almost certainly winnable changes how you think: you stop hoping and start planning, and that habit carries into every other game here.