Travellers (card game)

Travellers is a card game of the patience genre which uses a single card pack of either 52 or 32 playing cards. It is also known as All Fours, Clock, Four of a Kind, Hidden Cards, Hunt, Sundial or Watch. Parlett notes that the game has a "rhythmical feature that might be called 'shuttling'", as in the game of Weavers.^[1]

Description[]

Twelve piles of 4 cards each are laid out on the table, face up, and a further talon of four cards, face down. The piles are named, in order, the Ace pile, the Queens pile and so on, down to the Twos. The aim is to end with thirteen piles of four, each pile consisting of cards of the same rank as the name of the pile. The top card of the talon is flipped and placed at the bottom of its corresponding named pile. The top card of that pile is taken and placed under its named pile and so on. If the top card is a King, it is placed in a separate Kings pile.^[1]

Variations[]

Sometimes the piles are laid out in the shape of a clock, hence some of the alternative names. When played this way the game is usually called Clock Patience.

One variant allows a player to replace the final king with a facedown card in order to keep playing, and the game only ends if the fourth king reappears.^[1]

In a German variant called Hide-and-Seek (Versteckenspiel), there are 13 piles from Ace to Two, laid out face-down this time in a row of seven and a row of six. The first pickup is from the Ace pile; thereafter shuttling takes place as described above.^[2]

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Heinrich, Rudolf (2011). Die schönsten Patiencen, Perlag-Reihe Vol. 641, 35th edition. Vienna: Perlag-Reihe. ISBN 978-3-99006-001-8
• Parlett, David (1979). The Penguin Book of Patience. London: Penguin. ISBN 0 7139 1193 X

See also[]

• Clock Patience
• List of solitaires
• Glossary of solitaire