Clock
Also known as Clock Patience, Clock Solitaire, The Clock, Sundial
- Players
- 1 player
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards)
- Time
- 5-10 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Solitaire (1 player)
Setup
Shuffle a full 52-card deck and deal it into thirteen face-down piles of four without looking at anything. Dealing one card at a time and going round the layout four times is the tidy way to do it and keeps the piles honest.
Twelve of the piles form a ring in the positions of the numerals on a clock face, one at twelve o'clock, one at one o'clock, and so on round to eleven. The thirteenth pile sits in the middle of the ring. That centre pile belongs to the kings, and it is also where play starts.
Ranks map onto the hours the obvious way. An ace is one o'clock, each numeral card is its own number, the jack is eleven and the queen is twelve. Kings have no hour on a dial, so they go to the centre. Suit and colour never matter for anything.
As the game runs, every position grows a face-up group underneath its face-down packet, so leave each pile enough room for a spread below it. Nothing else is needed: no stock, no waste, no foundations.
Play
Turn the top card of the centre pile face up. After that the game runs itself.
Read whatever card is now in your hand as an address. An eight is addressed to eight o'clock, a jack to eleven o'clock, a king to the middle. Carry it there and tuck it face up beneath the face-down packet waiting at that position. The position pays you back on the spot: help yourself to its topmost face-down card, and that card becomes the one in your hand, to be read and delivered by exactly the same procedure. Each card names the pile you visit next, and the pile you visit hands you the next card, so the whole deal is one unbroken chain.
There is nothing to choose at any point. You never pick a destination, never pick which pile to open, and never decide when to turn. The chain is fixed by the shuffle from the first card onward, and two people dealt the same pack in the same order get the same result. This is why Clock is handed to children rather than played as a contest: nothing anywhere in it responds to skill.
The chain can only ever die at the centre. Every other pile hands you a replacement the moment you add a card to it, because it starts with four face-down cards and receives exactly four over the course of a deal. The centre is the exception: it gave up its first card for free at the very start, so it is running one turn ahead of its supply all game. Placing the fourth king therefore leaves nothing to turn and the deal stops on the spot, however many cards are still face down elsewhere. For the same reason a pile can never strand you by handing you a card of its own hour at the wrong moment, which is a worry beginners often have and never need to.
Watch the face-down packets thin out as you go, because that is the only feedback the game gives. If the ring is emptying evenly by the time the third king shows, the deal is alive. If two or three positions have never been visited at all, it is already lost and the remaining turns are just confirmation.
Goal & scoring
You win by turning every card in the layout, which happens exactly when the fourth king is the last card you turn up. At that moment all thirteen positions hold their four matching cards face up, the ring reads round in order from one to twelve, and the kings are in the middle where they belong.
You lose the moment the fourth king appears with any face-down card still on the table. There is no rescue and no redeal built into the game; you gather the cards, shuffle and start over.
The odds are fixed and well known. Since there are no decisions to make, the result is settled entirely by the shuffle, and the chance of a win works out at one deal in thirteen, a shade under eight per cent. Nothing you do changes that. If you want something to compare between deals, count the cards left face down when the fourth king turns up and treat fewer as better: a deal that stalls with three cards down was an unlucky shuffle, while one that stalls with thirty was never going anywhere.
Variants
Watch — The usual relief valve, met under this name and under none at all. The first time the fourth king comes up, you may set it aside and turn any face-down card still left in the layout instead, resuming the chain from there. One rescue per deal only. A game that was failing badly still fails, but the near misses, the deals that stall with a couple of cards to go, mostly come home. It adds no decision worth the name, since which card you pick makes no difference to whether the chain survives.
Play it out — Rather than stopping when the fourth king kills the chain, restart it and carry on until every card in the layout is face up. The first death is always in the centre but later ones can strand you anywhere, so fix the restart point by the dial rather than by where you stopped: go to one o'clock and turn its top face-down card, and if that position is already clear keep stepping clockwise until you reach one that is not. Restart as often as necessary, and score the deal by the number of restarts you needed, lowest best. The procedure is otherwise unchanged. It suits younger players, who tend to find the abrupt ending of the standard game unsatisfying, and it at least gives every deal a number rather than a flat loss.
Grandfather's Clock — A different game that borrows the dial, and the one to look for if the clock face is the appeal but pure luck is not. Twelve foundations are laid out as a clock face, each starting on a different card, and each is built upwards in suit, turning the corner from king to ace as needed, until its top card is the one matching its hour: an ace at one o'clock, a 10 at ten, the queen at twelve. The forty cards left over form eight tableau columns of five, built down regardless of suit and moved one card at a time. That is twelve plus forty, so the pack comes out exactly. Unlike Clock it involves genuine choices. Big Ben is the two-pack relative built on the same idea. Neither is a variant of this game in any real sense — they only borrow the dial.
Background
A nineteenth-century game, known then as The Clock and shortened since. It descends from an older European game called Wandering Card, and its defining trick — a card goes under a pile and the next card comes off the top of that same pile — has a name of its own, shuttling.
The name is a mess and worth a warning. Travellers, Hidden Cards and Four of a Kind are each offered somewhere as another name for it, and none of them is. Travellers and Hidden Cards are separate descendants of Wandering Card with their own layouts and their own shuttling rules, and Four of a Kind is a different mechanism altogether. Pulling the other way, several unrelated patiences are called Clock or The Clock — Big Ben, Grandfather's Clock, a member of the Simple Addition family, and a German stock-and-waste game published as Die Uhr that turns on skill rather than luck. If you are handed a game called Clock, check whether the kings go in the middle before assuming it is this one.
Rules checked against Wikipedia, GameRules.com, BVS Solitaire, Wolfram MathWorld, Cats at Cards, MobilityWare, Anytime Card Games, CardGames.io.