Canfield
Also known as Demon, Demon Patience
- Players
- 1 player
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 10-25 minutes
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Category
- Solitaire (1 player)
Setup
Before anything else, the name. In North America this game is Canfield and Klondike is Klondike; in older British books Canfield is the name given to Klondike, and this game is Demon Patience. Two respectable traditions, two incompatible answers, and the confusion goes back to a single 1908 collection that printed both games, its rules headed Canfield describing what is now called Klondike. Go by the layout below rather than by whatever is printed at the top of the page you are reading.
Count out thirteen cards face down in a column and turn the last of them face up. That column is the reserve, and it is the demon: everything difficult about the game lives in those thirteen cards, which you cannot see and cannot get at except one at a time from the top.
Turn the next card and set it above and to the right. Whatever rank it happens to be is the base rank, and it decides the shape of the whole game — all four foundations must begin on that rank, so if it is a nine you are looking for the other three nines before anything else can start.
Lay four cards face up in a row beneath the space kept for the foundations. That is the tableau, and four columns is all you get. The remaining thirty-four cards are the stock.
There is nothing else to arrange and nobody to wait for.
Play
Foundations go upwards in suit from the base rank and turn the corner at the top: after the king comes the ace, then the two, and each pile finishes on the rank just below the one it started from. Tableau columns go downwards in alternating colours and turn the corner at the bottom, so a king may be laid on an ace.
What may be moved where:
- The face-up card at the foot of the reserve is available at all times, to a foundation or to a tableau column.
- The top card of the waste is available in the same way.
- From a tableau column you may take the top card by itself, or lift the entire column and set it down as a unit. What you may never do is split a column and move part of it. This is the rule that separates Canfield from Klondike, and forgetting it makes the game look far more generous than it is.
- Whether a card already banked on a foundation may be brought back down to the tableau is a thing rule sets differ over, so settle it before you start. Where it is allowed it is worth doing when it unblocks something, and worth thinking about first, since it cannot be done twice in a row to any effect.
Empty a tableau column and the reserve refills it — not any card you like, the next card off the reserve. Emptying columns is therefore the only way to dig through the demon, and it is the engine of the whole game rather than a side effect of it. Once the reserve is finally exhausted, a gap is filled from the waste instead, and at your own choosing rather than automatically; at that point the position usually opens up all at once.
When nothing else will move, deal three cards face up from the stock to the waste and try again with whatever is now on top. Take the waste through as many times as you like: the stock is turned over and dealt again without limit, so the game only ends when a full pass produces no move at all.
One piece of technique is worth knowing before the first deal, because it is less a trick than the way the game is meant to be played. There are two hidden places on the table and only one of them stays hidden. Whatever is not in the thirty-four cards the stock will show you, and not already face up, is in the reserve — so a single pass through the stock before you move anything tells you which thirteen cards the demon is holding, missing base cards included. What it cannot tell you is the order they sit in, and that stays hidden to the end. What using the waste costs is position: every card taken off it shifts the rest back by one on the following pass, which is occasionally a tool and more often the reason a card you were counting on fails to come round.
Goal & scoring
All fifty-two cards onto the foundations. Nothing else counts as a win, and most deals do not produce one.
How often is worth stating carefully, because the answer depends less on the game than on who is playing it and how much of it they can see. A solver that can see every card and never errs gets home on roughly 71 percent of deals. Very strong human play, with the reserve genuinely hidden and each waste-pile decision reshuffling everything behind it, is credited with something nearer 35. Ordinary play comes in far below that again, and no figure for it is firmly established — general-audience accounts quote numbers as low as three percent — so treat any single percentage for casual play as describing its own sample rather than the game. The gap between the first number and the last is not a measure of how hard the game is; it is a measure of how much of it is played blind.
So count cards banked rather than games won. Around forty of the fifty-two is what the solver gets home on an average deal, which makes it a target rather than an expectation, and getting all four foundations open at all is a decent afternoon's result on a bad deal.
The historical scoring is the gambling version the game is named after, and you can play it against yourself with a notepad. A pack costs fifty by most accounts and fifty-two by others, each card you get onto a foundation pays five, and so ten or eleven cards is break-even and anything above that is profit. Richard Canfield ran it at his Saratoga Springs casino from about 1900, one croupier per player, and the players lost steadily — as anyone who has tried to bank ten cards from a cold deal would expect. It did not last. He sold the place in 1907, and historians of the game now suspect that what he actually dealt was Klondike, which would make this the one card game named for a gambler who dealt something else.
Variants
Storehouse — Also called Reserve or Thirteen Up, and much the kindest member of the family. Take the four twos out before dealing and set them up as the foundations, so the base rank is fixed and all four piles are open from the first move — which removes the thing that strangles most Canfield deals. Foundations build up in suit as usual, but the tableau builds down in suit too rather than by alternating colours. The stock turns one card at a time and may be run through only twice. Its ceiling is lower than Canfield's at around 44 percent winnable, and yet ordinary players win close to that, which tells you most of what you need to know about where Canfield's difficulty actually comes from.
Rainbow — Canfield with the colour rule dropped: tableau columns build down by rank alone and suit is ignored entirely. To pay for that the stock is turned one card at a time and redeals are limited, commonly to none at all or to two. It is the version to reach for when a game keeps dying on a tableau full of same-coloured cards, and the single-card turn makes the waste pile far easier to plan around.
Selective Canfield — Deal the reserve, then turn five cards instead of four. Choose whichever of the five you want as the base card and lay the other four out as the tableau. Everything afterwards is ordinary Canfield. One choice, made before a single card has moved, and it is a real one: a base rank near the middle leaves you tableau space above and below it, while a base of two or a base of king means half the pack has nowhere useful to go.
Superior Canfield — Two rules relaxed at once. The whole reserve is spread face up so you can see all thirteen cards from the start, and an empty tableau column may be filled with any available card rather than only from the reserve. Together they turn the game from a blind one into a puzzle, which is either the point or a betrayal of it depending on why you sat down. It is the closest thing in the family to playing Canfield with the solver's information.
Double-pack Canfield — Two packs shuffled together and five tableau columns rather than four. The form the books describe goes under the name Variegated Demon: the base rank is fixed at the ace instead of being dealt for, single cards or whole sequences may be moved between columns rather than only entire columns, and two redeals are allowed. With two of every card a rank you need is rarely stuck in one place, and the extra column gives the alternating-colour build somewhere to go, so it is a reasonable answer for anyone who likes the shape of Canfield and has grown tired of losing to it.
Rules checked against Wikipedia, GameRules.com, Solitaired, Solitaire-Play.