Clock Patience

Clock Patience, also called Clock Solitaire, is a luck-based patience or solitaire card game with the cards laid out to represent the face of a clock.[1][2] It is also known under alternative names such as Dial, Travelers, Hidden Cards, and Four of a Kind.[3]

Clock
A Patience game
Initial layout of Clock Solitaire; Numbers/letters represent the piles.
Alternative namesTravellers
Named variantWatch
TypeNon-Builder
DeckSingle 52-card
See also Glossary of solitaire

Clock Patience is a purely mechanical process with no room for skill, and the chances of winning are exactly 1 in 13.[4]

Rules

One deck of cards (minus jokers) is used. The deck is shuffled and twelve piles of four cards each are laid out, face down, in a circle. The remaining four cards are placed, also face down, in a pile in the center of the circle.

The twelve positions around the circle represent the 12-hour clock and the pile in the middle represents the hands.

Play starts by turning over the top card of the central pile. When a card is revealed, it is placed face up under the pile at the corresponding hour (i.e., Ace = 1 o'clock, 2 = 2 o'clock, etc. The Jack is 11 o'clock and the Queen is 12 o'clock) and the top card of the pile of that hour is turned over. If a King is revealed, it is placed face up under the central pile.

Play continues in this fashion and the game is won if all the cards (including four Kings) are revealed; turning up the fourth king means you will have completed the clock and won the game.[5] The game is lost if the fourth King is turned up while any cards remain face down.[6]

Variations

A variation of Clock Patience commonly called Watch is played like Clock Patience, but players can continue the play when the fourth king appears, by replacing it with a still face-down card.[7] The game ends when that fourth king reappears.

The Clock (sometimes also called "German Clock") is a stock and waste type of solitaire originally called "Die Uhr", and described in a German solitaire book by Rudolf Heinrich from 1976.[8] This gives rules for very different game-play that depends on skill not to miss cards that can be played to the foundations.

References
  1. Albert H. Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith (2011). Hoyle's Rules of Games, 3rd revised and updated edition. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc. ISBN 0-451-20484-0
  2. "Clock Patience (p.12) in Card & Dice Games by N.A.C. Bathe, Robert Frederick Ltd, 2004.ISBN 1-889752-06-1
  3. "Clock" (p.36) in Little Giant Encyclopedia of Games for One or Two, The Diagram Group, 1998. ISBN 0-8069-0981-1
  4. Clock Solitaire by Weisstein, Eric W. MathWorld - A Wolfram Web Resource. Accessed 14 October 2020
  5. "Clock Patience" (p.17) in Card Games by John Cornelius, Parragon, 1998. ISBN 1-86309-571-3
  6. "Clock" (p.25) in The Little Book of Solitaire, Running Press, 2002. ISBN 0-7624-1381-6
  7. "Clock Patience" in Glenn, Jim and Denton, Carey. The Treasury of Family Games (page 101). Reader's Digest, 2003 (ISBN 9780762104314)
  8. Heinrich, Rudolf (2011). Die schönsten Patiencen, Perlen-Reihe 641, 35th edition. Vienna: Perlen-Reihe Verlag. ISBN 3-85223-095-0

See also
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