Patience Clocks

Concept & Considerations

Classical Patience Clocks are clocks built from card decks, and their mechanism is activated by playing after a simple set of rules. Properly working Patience Clocks of this traditional class offer, almost literally, a rather playful way to exercise patience [see ibid.]. At the same time, they allow to measure Patience Time [see ibid.].

Accordingly, the easiest way to understand how Patience Clocks work is to take a look at their common reference, Clock Patience.
Clock Patience (aka Clock Solitaire) is a well known solitary card game – basically just one of many variations of playing Patience as solitary game.

As already the name of the game suggests, Patience is about spending time in patience. Or trying to do so, at least. Some people may find it helpful to play patience in order to stay patient or to exercise patience.

In the case of Clock Patience, the exercise – the game – is set up the following way:
The first round will set up the clockface. The position of the hours has to be filled with cards of related positions within the deck, aces going to one, knights to eleven, queens to twelve and kings to the centre. Apart from that, there are only the following rules: Colors have to change between red and black. Cards that are not fitting are sorted out (external to the clockface). The smaller the staple of cards that has been sorted out, the better.

In contrast to other patience branda that refer to the figure of the clock face, the basic version of Clock Patience is not about strategy, buth rather about down-tempo – slowing down action, not to miss the right move at the right time.

Speaking of patience game set-ups based on clock faces, there are also several other brands, i.e. The Clock, Big Ben, and The Grandfather's Clock. Some of the latter come with more strategic elements. However, they all share the basic idea of patience, and of slowing down by the way of play.

Obviously, playing with time is an issue in exercising patience – and, as we should like to suggest, probably not limited to the latter.

Moreover, we may assume there are also other options to build patience clock mechanisms.

[To be continued…]

Related Entries:
Patience (work in progress)
Playtime (work in progress)
Time Bending Games (work in progress)
…

tags: clocks, clockworks, endurance, time