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Canfield is a Klondike-style game with a twist on every part of it. The foundations don't start at Ace, sequences wrap from Ace back to King, and a pile of 13 cards sits in reserve, waiting to be worked through.
It is a hard game to beat. The stock can be turned over as often as you like, so what limits you is the small tableau and the reserve.
Thirteen cards form the reserve, with only the top one showing. One card goes to the first foundation and sets the base rank for all four. Four columns get one card each, and the remaining 34 cards are the stock.
Move all 52 cards to the foundations. In practice the game is decided by the reserve, since those 13 cards can only come out from the top.
We ran our own solver on 200 shuffled deals of this version. It found a win in 91 of 200 (46%), showed that 12 could not be won, and ran out of its budget of 20,000 positions a deal on 97.
Those undecided deals may still be winnable, so treat the win count as a minimum. The solver can see every card, including face-down ones, so it measures what the cards allow, not how often a person will win.
First recorded in England in 1891 by Mary Whitmore Jones as Demon Patience, and still called Demon in Britain. The American name is linked to Richard A. Canfield, who ran a casino in Saratoga Springs from 1894, though the game played there may actually have been Klondike.
Love Canfield? Try these other solitaire variants on Solitaire Scramble:
The rank of the card dealt to the first foundation. If it is a 7, all four foundations start at 7 and run 8, 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, Ace and on up to 6.
No. You can move the bottom card, to a foundation or to another column, or the whole column. This is the traditional rule, and many online versions relax it.
As many as you like here. Canfield is hard enough with unlimited passes, though the game has been played with limits too.
Demon Patience is its original British name, and the reserve pile is often called the demon.