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Tam O'Shanter
Mar. 31st, 2010 08:00 amWhen I was a kid, you had to play solitaire with real cards. (Well, there were probably computer solitaire games out there in the late 70's, but not nearly as many as there are today.) I had the 150 Ways To Play Solitaire book, and while I probably never got around to trying all of them, I tried a fair few. Of course, I had my favourites, those I played more than others, and those ones changed from time to time.
I used to enjoy "Aces Up", which is nice and simple, or "Pyramid", or "Clock". It didn't matter if the game was infrequently won, if it was simple enough to deal in the first place. There's no point in having a big complicated layout that results in a two-minute game. I also sometimes like the longer, mechanical ones, like "Eight-Day Clock" or "Perpetual Motion", because they're repetitive and relaxing.
The vast majority of games, of course, are variants of the "build aces up to kings", with a few "build kings down to aces" (or both, especially with two decks). I liked the ones that were a little different. Like "Osmosis". There, not only is your starting foundation random, but you're not going in sequence: you can play any card on a foundation of the same suit, but only if it exists in the row above it. Or there's "Scorpion", which I found fun because, unlike those games where you can only build using the top card on a pile, you can move a card in the middle of a pile including everything on top of it. "Calculation" has four different piles where you build up by different intervals, but I find it frustrating these days and don't play it much. "Spider" I got into when I was a bit older, because it's a great strategy game, which I can win with reasonable frequency. "Gaps", or "Blue Moon", can be fun too, but it takes a lot of space to deal out.
I learned one from my grandparents that I've never seen in a book (though it's probably there somewhere); in their honour I tend to call it "Whittaker" or "Victor" (my grandpa's name). You have two decks, and you're trying to build one set of aces up to kings and one set of kings down to aces. You deal out the deck face-up into thirteen piles, Ace through King, and whenever the card you deal matches the pile you're dealing it into, you deal three cards face-down into a stock. You also deal one card into the stock after the King pile no matter what (my grandpa's version, "Victor", you dealt one after the four, seven, and ten pile as well). Then, while you can play the face-up cards on the foundations, you can also turn up a card from the stock, pick up the whole pile that it corresponds to (e.g. the Jack pile if you turn up a Jack), and play any of those cards up.
Of course, these days everyone plays solitaire on the computer. Decks of real cards are still around, of course, and they're useful for group card games, but when else is someone going to kill time by playing solitaire without having a computer? Admittedly, these days you also have wireless access to the Internet, so you could just as easily play Farmville as solitaire, but there's something about solitaire nonetheless. My favourite computer solitaire game was "Seahaven Towers" that I played on the SGI Irix workstations at university, because it had complete undo, and a feature where you could ask it to solve the game for you. If your game, as dealt, had no solution, you could ask the computer to solve it, and if it couldn't, then it counted as a win.
At some point I downloaded a bunch of solitaire games and packages; the one I use right now is called "Solitude", which I like because not only does it include a whole bunch of games, but it also keeps tracks of win/loss percentages. I regularly play either "Clock", "Osmosis", or "Scorpion" before shutting down my computer and going to bed.
I used to enjoy "Aces Up", which is nice and simple, or "Pyramid", or "Clock". It didn't matter if the game was infrequently won, if it was simple enough to deal in the first place. There's no point in having a big complicated layout that results in a two-minute game. I also sometimes like the longer, mechanical ones, like "Eight-Day Clock" or "Perpetual Motion", because they're repetitive and relaxing.
The vast majority of games, of course, are variants of the "build aces up to kings", with a few "build kings down to aces" (or both, especially with two decks). I liked the ones that were a little different. Like "Osmosis". There, not only is your starting foundation random, but you're not going in sequence: you can play any card on a foundation of the same suit, but only if it exists in the row above it. Or there's "Scorpion", which I found fun because, unlike those games where you can only build using the top card on a pile, you can move a card in the middle of a pile including everything on top of it. "Calculation" has four different piles where you build up by different intervals, but I find it frustrating these days and don't play it much. "Spider" I got into when I was a bit older, because it's a great strategy game, which I can win with reasonable frequency. "Gaps", or "Blue Moon", can be fun too, but it takes a lot of space to deal out.
I learned one from my grandparents that I've never seen in a book (though it's probably there somewhere); in their honour I tend to call it "Whittaker" or "Victor" (my grandpa's name). You have two decks, and you're trying to build one set of aces up to kings and one set of kings down to aces. You deal out the deck face-up into thirteen piles, Ace through King, and whenever the card you deal matches the pile you're dealing it into, you deal three cards face-down into a stock. You also deal one card into the stock after the King pile no matter what (my grandpa's version, "Victor", you dealt one after the four, seven, and ten pile as well). Then, while you can play the face-up cards on the foundations, you can also turn up a card from the stock, pick up the whole pile that it corresponds to (e.g. the Jack pile if you turn up a Jack), and play any of those cards up.
Of course, these days everyone plays solitaire on the computer. Decks of real cards are still around, of course, and they're useful for group card games, but when else is someone going to kill time by playing solitaire without having a computer? Admittedly, these days you also have wireless access to the Internet, so you could just as easily play Farmville as solitaire, but there's something about solitaire nonetheless. My favourite computer solitaire game was "Seahaven Towers" that I played on the SGI Irix workstations at university, because it had complete undo, and a feature where you could ask it to solve the game for you. If your game, as dealt, had no solution, you could ask the computer to solve it, and if it couldn't, then it counted as a win.
At some point I downloaded a bunch of solitaire games and packages; the one I use right now is called "Solitude", which I like because not only does it include a whole bunch of games, but it also keeps tracks of win/loss percentages. I regularly play either "Clock", "Osmosis", or "Scorpion" before shutting down my computer and going to bed.
