Patience with Jeb Loy Nichols and the Country Soul brothers and sisters.

A lockdown pastime. Playing patience with Jeb Loy Nichols and the Country Soul brothers and sisters. Making these hand-printed letterpress playing cards and a collaboration with Jeb were a highlight in the print room last year.

You got it wrong is from Jeb Loy Nichols and the Westwood All-Stars new album June is short, July is long Available here.


Rules of the game: patience #1 (the one where all the cards are dealt out).

Deal by placing one card, face up, on the table in front of you then, to this card's right, six more face down. Go back to the second face down card and place one face up and five face down, go back to the third and repeat until you have seven piles with the top cards facing up. Not place another card face up on the second pile, a little lower than the first so the number and suite is visible. Continue along the doing the same until the seventh pile. Then go back to the third pile and do the same, essentially you are building down the table so that the shape of the tableau is a right-angled triangle upside-down. You will have three cards at the end. Add one to each of the last three runs of cards.

Your objective is to uncover the aces and place them along the top of the tableau so you can build up in number from ace to king each of the suites. So whenever you an ace is exposed, move it to the top and keep an eye out for the next number to be exposed in play.

In the tableau, the next descending number of the same suite can be added to any exposed card (the ones at the bottom of the run of up-turned cards). For example, if you have a nine of spades exposed and you can see somewhere on the table (not in the same line of cards as the nine) the eight of spades, you can pick up the eight and all the cards that are on top of it and move that whole section of cards to lay on top of the nine. When a whole column is moved, you can turn over the cards in the piles behind. If a gap appears, you can only fill it with a king (but it can be a king with all the cards that are on top of it in its column).

You continue to move cards in this way and hope to uncover the aces of each suite and then the cards from ace to king that help you build up a final set of four piles with king on top. But it doesn’t always go to plan and if you find you can’t move, you just have to take deep breath, gather up the cards and start again.