What Is Death’s Head Patience?

Death’s Head Patience is a card game integral to Saki’s short story “The Seventh Pullet“. When I read the story, I was unfamiliar with the game, and wondered if it exists or is a fictional game made up by the author. The latter appears to be true. However, when I began searching for details about Death’s head patience, sources of information were limited. Answers.com was one of the few sites answering this question. Unfortunately, the three top answers are AI fabrications, presented as fact. They are wrong. The site has one correct answer, pushed to the bottom of the page, below the nonsense provided by the bots.

The original, human-supplied answer describes Death’s Head patience as a “game of solitaire with very complicated rules” and that “the few people who have successfully completed the game dropped dead the next moment”. That’s a perfect description!

But is Death’s Head Patience a real game? That seems unlikely. If it existed, I would have probably found information about it on some of the online encyclopedias or games websites. I did not. And—seriously!—if it did exist—who would want to play such a game? It would be like playing Russian Roulette with cards.

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