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British Blockade

solitaire card game which is played with two decks of playing cards.

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ7135034
Source-derived summary

British Blockade, also known as Parallels, is an old English patience or card solitaire of the blockade family which is played with two packs of playing cards. The name British Blockade was given to distinguish it from French Blockade which, however, is not a blockade game. The name Parallels is simply derived from the fact that the cards are lined up in rows parallel to each other.

Rules

First, one King and one Ace of each suit is removed and the Aces and Kings are each lined into columns to form the foundations. The Aces are built up while the Kings are built down all by suit.

Between the two foundation columns, the player deals a row of ten cards, forming the tableau. All of these cards are available for play on the foundations and the spaces they leave behind are immediately filled from the stock.

When play comes to a stand still, a second row of ten cards is dealt below the first row. All cards are still available for play and the spaces left behind are immediately filled from the stock.

When play comes to a stand still a second time, a third row of ten cards is dealt.

Editorial summary

“British Blockade” enters the record as solitaire card game which is played with two decks of playing cards. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what British, Blockade and solitaire can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current 201-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around British, Blockade and solitaire.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“British Blockade” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, British, Blockade and solitaire provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7135034. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow British Blockade primary sources, British Blockade archive and British research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from British Blockade” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.