Guide to the Cardpocalypse, part six: Solitaire (and the end)

What if the Cardpocalypse is so bad that you are the last person on Earth?  Will there still be a use for that fancy-schmancy pristine Kem deck you pilfered from my house because, well, you knew I had one and I’m no longer around to fight you for it?

Well… yes.

But don’t play Klondike

Klondike is the game most people think of when they think of solitaire.  It’s the one that was built into Windows since 3.1.  It’s also a terrible game.

The problem with Klondike is that the majority of deals are impossible.  I do mean majority; some estimates put the win-rate of a perfect player at something close to 4%.  Those are awful odds, and you should never play Klondike again.

You will, because it’s the one solitaire you’re pretty much guaranteed to already know, but you shouldn’t.

If you want that Klondike feel but also want to win on the regular, try Westcliff; it has 10 piles of 3 as the starting layout, allows any card to be moved to an empty column rather than just kings, and is otherwise identical to Klondike.  It also comes out something like 90% of the time with intelligent play.

The (first) other Windows solitaire is great, though

Unlike Klondike, Freecell is absolutely worth your time.  It’s a high-strategy game with very few unwinnable deals.  But just because only one in ten thousand or so deals can’t be won doesn’t mean that you will win them all; there’s a lot of tactical nuance to Freecell that means it will take some serious effort to get good at the game.  It’s time well-spent, though.  This is one of those cases where the really popular thing is also a thing that should be really popular.

(Spider is a fine game too, but it’s a bit of a mess to play with physical cards, given that it requires two decks and involves a whole lot of shifting cards around.  If you want something good in that vein, Spiderette combines Spider and Klondike into a game that’s probably better than the former and definitely better than the latter.  It comes out about 15% of the time, which is low, so be forewarned.)

File this one under “pretty good”

Bisley is a neat, simple one-deck solitaire that allows you to build on a pair of foundations for each suit rather than the typical one.  It’s pretty high-skill with a reasonably high solvable probability (probably in the one-in-four range), and it also happens to be really easy to intuit if you’ve played other solitaires before, something that takes a while in a game like Freecell.

An appropriate, kablooey-ey ending

David Parlett is a fascinating man, having invented quite a few excellent games such as Ninety-Nine, seen here earlier.  He also edited an excellent book on solitaires, which I keep handy because I’m a huge nerd.  It includes several games of his own devising.  One of the better ones is Black Hole, a game all about eliminating cards by bobbing up and down… or something like that.  Someone did the math and determined that almost 90 percent of the deals are winnable, so, y’know, that’s on you if you don’t succeed.  (He also has a Freecell variant called Penguin that’s supposedly pretty good, but I don’t know why you wouldn’t just play Freecell instead.)

And, as with the utter end of a bright shining star that a black hole represents–yes, I know it was probably a red giant and not actually that bright beforehand, you shush you–we also come to the utter end of this Guide to the Cardpocalypse.  Hopefully you’ve learned a few new games to break out at the table, or at least have some pointers to explore when you’re wondering what else you can do with that thin stack of pasteboard… or plastic, of course, if you’re doing it right.  I love cards, and I hope you do, or will, too.

8 thoughts on “Guide to the Cardpocalypse, part six: Solitaire (and the end)”

  1. ”that almost percent of” <– inquiring minds want to know the percentage…?

    Also, it is the bright blue gas giants and similar stars that are more likely to end their lives in supernovas. The conventional wisdom is stars with more than about 25 solar masses, although there is still a lot of uncertainty about that (https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0611589). AIUI, Red dwarfs are more likely to be a late stage star of about 1 solar mass, and unlikely to have enough mass to result in a supernova. I'll take my shooshing and return to the corner of the Internet, now.

    1. It’s ninety. Fixed.

      I won’t fix the star bit, though, because if my copy/memories of National Geographic’s Our Universe that I carried around with me religiously as a kid is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

  2. I thoroughly enjoyed this series and definitely picked up a few new games to try (in particular, Preference, Spite and Malice, and Bartok, which, as a Nomic fan, I’m frustrated that I haven’t come across).

    Thank you for writing this!

    1. Glad you liked the series! If it gets even a couple of people to try a few new games, it’ll have served its purpose.

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