Elevens is a
patience
or forbearance, is the ability to endure difficult or undesired long-term circumstances. Patience involves perseverance or tolerance in the face of delay, provocation, or stress without responding negatively, such as reacting with disrespect ...
or
card solitaire
Patience (Europe), card solitaire, or solitaire (US/Canada), 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. Most are in ...
of the
Simple Addition family that uses a
standard 52-card deck
The standard 52-card deck of French-suited playing cards is the most common pack of playing cards used today. The main feature of most playing card decks that empower their use in diverse games and other activities is their double-sided design, w ...
, with the goal of removing pairs of cards that add to eleven.
[Moyse (1950), p. 5.] Odds of winning are slightly better than 1 in 10.
Rules
Cards are placed in a 3x3 grid. Pairs of cards which add up to eleven (5 and 6; 4 and 7; 3 and 8; 2 and 9; Ace and 10) are covered up.
Face cards
In a deck of playing cards, the term face card (US) or court card (British and US), and sometimes royalty, is generally used to describe a card that depicts a person as opposed to the pip cards. In a standard 52-card pack of the English patter ...
(
J,
Q,
K) may be eliminated in a set of three cards consisting of one Jack, one Queen and one King regardless of
suit
A suit, also called a lounge suit, business suit, dress suit, or formal suit, is a set of clothes comprising a suit jacket and trousers of identical textiles generally worn with a collared dress shirt, necktie, and dress shoes. A skirt su ...
.
If all cards are covered up the game is won; if there are no more pairs of cards that add up to eleven, and there do not exist a Jack, a Queen, and a King, the game is lost.
Strategy
An individual game of Elevens is a game of pure chance, except for the small element of skill involved in spotting the pairs; the skill and strategic interest comes in not shuffling the cards at the end of each game, but instead collecting them up in order.
Variations
Elevens is very similar to several other solitaire games in the adding and pairing genre, such as Fifteens, Straight Fifteens, Block 10, and Kings in the Corners, all of which use a 4x4 grid, but require players to remove pairs adding to a total other than 11 such as 15 or 10. The solitaire games Tens,
Good Thirteen (also called Thirteens), Seventeens,
["Seventeens" (p.92) in David Galt, ''101 Great Card Games''. Publications International, 1999. ] and Eighteens apply a similar concept to other totals.
See also
*
List of solitaires
This is a list of patiences, which are card games that are also referred to as solitaires or as card solitaire.
This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but only includes games that have met the usual Wikipedia requirements (e.g. notabilit ...
*
Glossary of solitaire
Games of patience, or (card) solitaires as they are usually called in North America, have their own 'language' of specialised terms such as "building down", "packing", "foundations", "talon" and "tableau". Once learnt they are helpful in de ...
References
Bibliography
* Moyse, Alphonse Jr. (1950). ''150 Ways to Play Solitaire''. USPCC. 128 pp.
Single-deck patience card games
Closed non-builders
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