Winston Churchill’s lost card game now on iOS thanks to Donald Rumsfeld

The smaller screen shows off Churchill Solitaire's "devil's six" row, whose cards can never be placed in the descending columns and must be played in order. (credit: Churchill Solitaire)

Aspiring video game designers are often pointed to a simple exercise: take a deck of cards and invent a new game. Apparently, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did just that (albeit with two decks) in inventing his own twist on solitaire during the 20th century.

That game could have easily been lost to the sands of time. Instead, it now exists as a free-to-try app on the iOS App Store all thanks to... Donald Rumsfeld?

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the former US Secretary of Defense teamed up with a game developer to develop and launch Churchill Solitaire for iOS devices. Rumsfeld told the paper he learned to play the game during an ambassadorship in the 1970s. Churchill's invention was shared with Rumsfeld by a Belgian ambassador who had been friends with Churchill, and while the Churchill family never found a reference to the game in his collection of letters, a family representative told the WSJ that Rumsfeld's story "is entirely credible."

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