Please make sure, that you have rhe following packages install. When your 
distribution split these packages in * and *-devel (e.g. evas and evas-devel),
you also need the correspondending devel-package to build elitaire.

You need:
	* eet
	* evas
	* ecore
	* edje
	* esmart
	* ewl

To compile and install elitaire, it's the standard three liner:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ su
# make install

The standard localstatedir of autoconf is $(prefix)/var, this is not
FHS-conform. So I would recommend you to use /var/games or /var/lib/games :

./configure --localstatedir=/var/games
