The card game we consider "solitaire" is in fact a French invention, as the earliest texts still remaining are written by Frenchmen in French explaining the rules of the game of "Patience." Patience games became popular in Britain, and from there spread to the Americas with the expansion of the British empire.
What is solitaire, though? Why do we play it the way we do? What does the game communicate to us? Games meant for an individual are often seen as a way to pass the time, to occupy the mind, to busy the fingers. But games are agreements, contracts entered into between players, or between the player and the game itself. The game and the agreement are both encapsulated in the rules of the game. The rules are the reason you play the game, and the very thing you play, simultaneously. Whether you expect it or not, the act of playing the game is an act of agreement, and it is worth taking a minute to examine what you're agreeing to.
Start at the start. What is the card? Pairing a unit of measure with an amount of the same; it is almost a mnemonic device to teach Arabic numerals. The numeral 2, and two diamonds, two clubs, two hearts, two spades. But after the numeral ten, we encounter the "face" cards--the anthropomorphic display of royalty, the Jack, the Queen, the King, and ending paradoxically with the ace, alphabetical, anumerical. We have an unexpected island of humanity in a sea of abstraction, of quantized units. And they are not just any people, they are the ruling class.
The by-now-familiar game of Solitaire we all recognize begins with an arrangement of seven stacks of cards, with each stack consisting of the same number of cards as its position from the left (that is, the first stack from the left contains one card, the second stack two cards, etc.). The goal is to order the cards into suits, beginning with the ace and ascending numerically until reaching the king. But to achieve this goal we first order the cards into four stacks, starting with kings, and arranging them in a flip-flop color order--red, black, red, black (Stendhal would surely approve).
It is almost an exercise in mannered futility. Begin with one arbitrary hierarchy--that of space and number--and replace it with another arbitrary hierarchy, a mixture of color and number, while aiming at yet a third arbitrary hierarchy of homogeneity. What is it about? What are we agreeing to? What is its purpose, locked in the rules?
It does not seem to mean anything. It does not seem to have a purpose other than killing time.
But we begin with a hierarchy. A progression through space from left to right of an increasing quantity. And to progress through space is to progress through time; we begin with one card and apportion our stacks with more and more, until we have seven cards at the end of the line. We seed the stacks, arrange the layout, set the field ourselves.
It is easiest to remove the stack with the fewest cards, and to do so is to open the space that stack used to occupy. One can fill empty spaces only with kings, with patriarchs; and from the patriarchs we descend until we have an ordered kingdom descending to the lowest quantity. We alternate colors but we are not finished. We must arrange the cards into their own suits in reverse order, until the king lands on top, in his rightful place at the throne.
The game speaks to ethnicity and segregation, to the rightness of homogeneity and clearly-defined color boundaries. In today’s cards the backdrop is whiteness, but it would be wrong to speak of “white” cards; no, the colors are red and black, and the redness and the blackness is a point of difference, a dimension to be controlled for, a reason to arrange. In the initial stage of the game we place black cards on red cards and vice versa, but only in tightly-controlled descending numerical order. In the final stage—to “win” the game—we place the colors in the same pile, rearranging our initial diffusion, creating two stacks of each color. That is winning, that is the state in which we seek to move the universe of solitaire: every color has its place.
That white is not a color of the cards is telling. It is the backdrop, the canvas against which red and black are defined. Whiteness is the state of things until color comes to mar the canvas with contrast. There is no reason to consider white in the cards as a special entity, because white isn’t even a color here.
Some things to think of next time you play the cards and rearrange the colors into their proper order. The imperialist in Napoleon surely saw the draw in being able to arrange your own universe, to lay the colors down in quantities, to take the extant numbers and move them according to your whim. It speaks to the ethnocentricity of imperialist Europe in its entirety, in its previous business with the slave trade, in the future destruction of the Native American.
Perhaps there is no hint of overt conquest in the game, and this is simply “reading too much into it.”
Maybe it’s just not in the cards.