Long Game
The practice of considering the future implications of current choices in the context of future situations, where there might be short-term losses strategically made in favor of the potential for long-term gains down the road.
Origin
The phrase traces to whist, a British card game that dominated drawing rooms for two centuries. Before roughly 1785, the standard form of the game was simply called "the long game" — played to nine or ten points — and was only renamed when a faster five-point variant, "short whist," began to overtake it. By 1840, the phrase had already migrated beyond the card table into metaphors for long-term aristocratic strategy. Henry George Bohn's 1856 handbook preserves the original gaming sense, capturing the exact moment the idiom was hardening into figurative language.