Patience

Patience 1.2 is Iain Bethune's freeware Mac OS X build of the classic Patience card game -- the same single-player layout known elsewhere as Klondike or Solitaire. Released by Pyramid Productions, it pairs a clean play surface with custom backgrounds and alternate card faces, and ships with a PDF manual covering rules and options.

The game itself

Patience is the standard one-deck solitaire most Mac users learned alongside the operating system: build descending alternating-color tableau columns, free up aces, and run all four suits up to king on the foundation piles. Bethune's implementation sticks to the canonical rules rather than offering exotic variants.

Customization

The headline feature over plain ports is theming. The download bundles ten alternative background images and two card sets, and the engine accepts user-supplied backgrounds and card art -- so players can swap the default felt for anything from a wood grain to a personal photo without touching application internals.

Distribution and licensing

Patience 1.2 is freeware, with the explicit condition that copies must be redistributed alongside the original PDF documentation. The author requests no payment but does ask that the manual travel with the application.

Note on Macintosh Garden listing

The Macintosh Garden entry for /games/patience hosts a different German-language solitaire ("Ein einfaches Solitarspiel") with unknown authorship targeting Mac OS 8 - 8.1 on 68k hardware -- not Bethune's OS X freeware. The Info-Mac upload here is the Pyramid Productions Patience 1.2 build.

System requirements

Mac OS X (Patience 1.2). Includes PDF manual. Author: Iain Bethune; publisher: Pyramid Productions. Distribution: freeware.