Most of the audience is familiar with games like Solitaire, Klondike, Spider, and other solitaire variations. But how many people worldwide are familiar with solitaire games, and what portion of them play regularly?
Solitaire is the most popular card game in the world. Various versions of this game are available in more than 200 countries and in 65 languages. Thanks to this, the number of players on PCs, mobile devices, and web portals with free solitaire games keeps growing. In addition, many people play solitaire with regular playing cards, without using online platforms or apps, making it harder to track the total audience. We decided to conduct a study to find out how many people worldwide play solitaire games and to explore the range of them to assess the relative popularity of each game and determine how popular each one is compared to the others.
Solitaire games were invented in the late 18th century. The first written mentions of them appeared in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. Solitaire was first mentioned in a Swedish book in 1788 titled “Description of Patiences” (German: “Beschreibung und Abbildung einer Anzahl neuer Patiencen”) by Gustav Lotzing. But with the advent of the computer era, they became highly popularized. In 1990, Microsoft integrated it into its operating system, initially to teach users how to work with the mouse, which was just beginning to gain popularity at the time. This caused a sharp rise in the popularity of solitaire games and the emergence of many alternatives to Microsoft’s solitaire. As a result, the current audience for Microsoft’s solitaire alone is over 35 million people per day.
According to statistics from statista.com, in 2024 alone, 2.09 billion solitaire apps were downloaded on Android and iOS. This allows us to estimate the number of players of these mobile apps in 2024. 2.09 / 1.8 = 1.16 billion. So, presumably, the mobile solitaire audience alone exceeds 1 billion unique users per year. To this, we also need to add the online solitaire audience that plays on web portals, as well as the PC audience.
But which solitaire games are the most popular? According to information from TheSolitaire.com, the preference list is distributed as follows:
As seen from the chart, the overwhelming number of games are classic Solitaire Klondike games and their variations. They are followed by FreeCell and Spider. However, less popular Golf, Forty Thieves, TriPeaks, and Yukon also have their players. As we can see the most popular solitaire games are precisely those that Microsoft included in its operating system in 1990, thereby significantly popularizing them. Other variations, although they have their audience, are much less popular.
