The History of Pyramid Solitaire
A patience game built around a completely different mechanic from Klondike, FreeCell, or Spider: instead of building sequences, you clear the board by pairing cards that add up to 13.
An Older, Loosely Documented Game
Pyramid belongs to the same large family of one-player "patience" card games as Klondike and FreeCell, most of which spread through 19th- and early-20th-century Europe and North America under a variety of regional names and minor rule variations. Like most classic solitaires, Pyramid's exact origin - who first laid 28 cards into a triangle and started pairing them off to 13 - isn't pinned down to any single documented source or date.
What is clear is what sets it apart from the rest of the family: while Klondike, FreeCell, and Spider are all, at heart, about building descending sequences of cards, Pyramid's defining mechanic is arithmetic - removing pairs whose values sum to exactly 13, plus the lone King that already equals 13 by itself. That sum-to-13 pairing rule is the single most historically distinctive thing about this game, and the clearest way to tell it apart from its sequence-building cousins.
Bundled With Windows, Again
Pyramid Solitaire had already circulated in physical card-game reference books and early digital solitaire collections for years, but it reached a genuinely mainstream audience the same way Klondike did decades earlier: by being bundled with Windows. Microsoft included it as one of the games in the Microsoft Solitaire Collection, built into Windows 8 and later, alongside Klondike, Spider, and FreeCell.
For a huge number of players who grew up with Windows Solitaire meaning Klondike specifically, the Solitaire Collection was many people's first real exposure to the pairing-based style of patience game Pyramid represents - a different kind of puzzle hiding under the same familiar "Solitaire" name.
This Version
PaperGames plays the standard ruleset: a fresh shuffle every game, all 28 pyramid cards dealt face-up from the start, a one-at-a-time stock/waste draw with up to 2 redeals, and the common "clear the pyramid" win condition - the stock and waste don't need to be emptied too, matching how most modern implementations of this game are played.