300 years of competitive solitaire — also known as Nerts, Nertz, Racing Demon, and Pounce
Play PeanutPeanut is a real-time multiplayer solitaire card game with deep roots as a folk game: games that spread through families, dorm rooms, and social gatherings rather than through publishers. Written records are sparse, and the game almost certainly existed for decades before anyone bothered to write it down. That's why it has so many names — Peanut, Nerts, Nertz, Racing Demon, Pounce, Squeal, Blitz. Each social circle named it independently.
Peanut descends from the broader family of competitive patience (solitaire) games that emerged in Europe in the 19th century. Single-player patience games first appeared in Northern Europe in the late 1700s (the earliest written reference is from a 1783 German book). By the mid-1800s, solitaire was widespread across Europe and had crossed to America.
The key innovation behind Nerts was a simple question: what if multiple people played solitaire at the same time, competing for shared foundation piles? That idea appeared in several forms, including Russian Bank (Crapette), a two-player competitive patience game documented in the mid-1800s, and Zank-Patience, the German name for a similar competitive patience variant.
The earliest well-documented form of what we'd recognize as Nerts is the British game Racing Demon. It appears in British card-game compilations from the early 1900s, though oral tradition places it in the late Victorian era (1880s - 1900). The card-game author Mary Whitmore Jones documented competitive patience games in the 1890s; her works are among the earliest to describe simultaneous multi-player solitaire.
The name "Demon" probably references Demon Patience (known as Canfield in America), a notoriously difficult single-player solitaire variant with a 13-card reserve pile. Canfield was named after Richard A. Canfield, a New York casino owner who allegedly offered the game as gambling: pay $52 for a deck, earn $5 back for every card built onto foundations. Racing Demon is essentially "what if we all played Canfield at the same time, sharing the foundation piles?"
The game almost certainly came to America via British immigrants in the late 1800s or early 1900s. The name "Nerts" is distinctly American. "Nerts" was 1920s slang meaning "nuts!" or "nonsense!" - an exclamation of frustration. It's plausible the name came from what players yelled during the frenzy of play. Some sources trace early American play to Pennsylvania Dutch communities in Lancaster County.
By the mid-20th century Nerts was tightly associated with college students and young adults. Standard decks, large groups, loud, fast, social - a perfect dorm game. This college and social transmission is why there are so many regional names today.
The sheer number of names for this game reflects how it spread - not through a single source, but through dozens of independent social networks:
Nerts occupies a genuinely rare design space in card games:
It's essentially a 300-year evolution from solitary European patience games into a frantic multiplayer race. Peanutroom.com is a free online version of that game.