Westcliff (card game)
card game
Westcliff is the name of two closely related patience or card solitaire games of the simple packer type, both of which are played using a deck of 52 playing cards. One version is particularly easy to win, with odds of 9 in 10; the other is harder with odds closer to 1 in 4. The game has a variant, Easthaven.
History and naming
The first known rules for this two-variant family were published under the name Westcliff Patience by Mary Whitmore Jones in 1911, who describes it as a "tantalising little game." This original version had a tableau of 21 cards in three overlapping rows. Packed sequences could be moved at will to spaces or other piles, but no more rows were dealt. Coops (1939) records it possibly for the first time in US also under the name of Westcliff and this is the name Parlett (1979) uses. Parlett also points out, however, the confusion generated by Morehead & Mott-Smith in 1949 when they described two new variants. Westcliff, the version with a 21-card tableau, was renamed Easthaven, and its rules eased to allow further rows of 7 cards to be dealt, but a restriction was placed on the filling of spaces. Meanwhile, the name Westcliff was transferred to a new variant with a 30-card tableau arranged in 10 piles of three cards. Its mechanics were the same as the original Westcliff, but the larger tableau made it easier to win.
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This entry incorporates text from “Westcliff (card game)” 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.