Patience, card solitaire or solitaire, is a genre of card games whose common feature is that the aim is to arrange the cards in some systematic order or, in a few cases, to pair them off in order to discard them. wikipedia.org
Most patience or solitaire games involve building sequences of cards in suit in order in a family running from ace to king. Normally the ace is the base card or foundation on which a two of the same suit is placed, followed by a three and so on.
Patience is thought to be German or Scandinavian in origin. The game became popular in France in the early 19th century, reaching Britain and America in the latter half. The earliest known recording of a game of patience occurred in 1788 in the German game anthology Das neue Königliche L'Hombre-Spiel.