Wish Patience

How to play the wish patience

Think of a wish. Thirty-two cards — Sevens up to Aces — are dealt into eight piles of four, face down, and the top card of each pile is turned over. Take any two face-up cards of the same rank: two Kings, two Nines, two Aces. Tap a card and it pairs with its partner (if there are two possible partners, drag it to the one you want). The cards underneath turn over, and you keep pairing.

If every card finds its pair, the wish is granted — that is the traditional reading. If you run out of pairs with cards still on the table, the answer is "not yet". Which pairs you take first matters: when two piles offer the same rank, clearing the taller pile usually gives you more to work with.

Where it comes from

The wish patience is one of the old fortune-telling games played with a piquet deck of 32 cards. It appears in L. Foli's Fortune-Telling by Cards (1915) as "the wish with thirty-two cards", and English cartomancy has long treated the Nine of Hearts as the wish card. Patience itself may have begun this way: the French name réussite means "success", whether the game — and the wish — comes out.

Wish Patience is a traditional game for entertainment. It does not predict the future.