Clock Patience

The chain

How to play Clock Patience

The deck is dealt into thirteen face-down piles of four: twelve arranged like the hours of a clock, and one in the middle. Nothing is visible, and nothing needs to be — the layout is the same every single time.

Turn the top card of the middle pile. Whatever it is, it goes under the pile named by its rank: a 9 to 9 o'clock, an ace to 1 o'clock, a queen to 12. Then turn the top card of that pile, and repeat. Each card you reveal tells you where to go next, so the game runs as one unbroken chain hopping around the dial.

Kings are the exception, and the reason there is a game here at all. A king has no hour, so it goes to the middle and the chain restarts from the centre. The middle pile holds four cards, so it can absorb exactly four visits. The fourth king is therefore the last card the centre can ever supply.

One move, two traps

The only move you ever have

Just one move is ever available, which makes this table short. It is here because the two illegal rows are the mistakes new players actually make.

The ending

Why the fourth king stops everything

Every king sends the chain back to the centre, and the centre has four cards. The first three kings are survivable: each one uses up a centre card but leaves at least one behind, so the chain can continue. The fourth king takes the last of them.

At that moment one of two things is true. Either all 52 cards are already face up, in which case the deal is complete and you have won — the fourth king is not a loss in itself, which surprises a lot of people. Or some pile still holds a face-down card, and there is now no card left to turn. The chain has nowhere to go and the deal is over.

This is why Clock Patience has no comeback mechanic. There is no stock to recycle, no alternative pile to try, and nothing you could have done differently. The shuffle decided the outcome before you turned the first card.

The bottom cards

Can you tell a deal is lost before you start?

Yes — if you are allowed to look at the bottom card of each hour pile. The bottom card is the last one a pile gives up, so it says where the chain goes once that pile is finished.

Draw an arrow from each of the twelve hour piles to the hour its bottom card belongs to, with kings pointing to the middle. If every chain of arrows ends in the middle, the deal will come out. If any arrows run round in a loop that never reaches the middle, it is already lost — each pile in the loop is waiting for a card that sits at the bottom of another pile in the same loop.

The smallest possible loop is one pile pointing at itself: a seven at the bottom of the seven o'clock pile. Only the other three sevens can open that pile, and it takes four visits to reach its last card, so that seven will never be turned.

That figure is exact rather than measured: it is the chance that none of the four kings lands among the twelve bottom cards. The arrow rule itself held on every one of the10 million deals we simulated.

The game at the top of this page uses the same rule. When a deal is lost, the result screen names the loop that did it, and those piles stay marked on the clock so you can check the bottom cards for yourself.

Measured on this page's game

What happens in 10 million deals

We played 10 million shuffled deals through the same game code that runs at the top of this page. These are the numbers that came out.

A win is the single most likely way for a deal to end, and yet more than nine deals in ten still lose. You are almost exactly as likely to lose with one card still face down as you are to win. Early wipe-outs are rare: only 0.18% of deals end before the thirteenth card, and 95% turn at least half the deck.

Skill, honestly

What you can and cannot control

Most solitaire guides have a strategy section. This one cannot, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. Once a card is turned, its destination is forced, and the order of the hidden cards was fixed by the shuffle. No sequence of choices exists to be made well or badly.

What is left is mechanical, and it is worth getting right on a phone. Eleven and twelve o'clock sit close together at the top of the dial, and it is easy to tap the wrong one or to tap the pile the card came from out of habit. If you do, the game keeps the same card active so you can pick the correct pile straight away — a misplaced tap costs nothing.

Undo is here for reviewing rather than rescuing. It can take back a placement so you can look at the position again, but it cannot change what is under the face-down cards. Restart replays the identical chain; only New game reshuffles.

If you would rather watch, Play it for me makes each forced placement at the speed you choose — slow enough to follow as a lesson, or instant. Your deals and wins are kept on this device under the clock, beside the long-run rate, so you can watch your own record drift towards one in thirteen.

A first card game

Is Clock Patience good for children?

It makes a very good first card game, precisely because it has no decisions. A young child practises reading the numbers on the cards and finding where each hour sits on a clock face, and a whole deal takes a couple of minutes. It is honest about luck, too: when a deal does not come out, nobody played it badly.

Same game, other names

Clock Solitaire, Sundial, Watch, and German Clock

Clock Patience is old. Nineteenth-century card books called it The Clock, and it descends from an older European game called Wandering Card. The names have multiplied since, and one of them belongs to a completely different game.

Clock Solitaire, Sundial, Clocktime and Circle Solitaire all describe this same dial and the same fourth-king ending, so if you arrived looking for one of those, you have found it. Watch is the same deal with one mercy swap, and that single swap rescues about 21% of all deals.

If you want decisions

What to play when the coin flip wears thin

Clock Patience is a good thirty seconds and a poor hour. If the forced moves start to grate, the fix is a game with the same low overhead and real choices in it. Accordion keeps the compact one-deck feel and gives you a genuine decision on almost every turn. Pyramid keeps the simple card values but asks which exposed pair to clear.

For something quick but properly tactical, Aces Up and Golf both finish in a couple of minutes and both punish a careless move. And if you want the opposite extreme — a game where the shuffle almost never decides anything — FreeCell hides nothing at all.