Obspogon

Or: I Learned To Play Solitaire At Nearly Age 34, Then Immediately Quit, Spit On Its Grave, And Declared It A Foolishness

Something that's important to know about me - and probably pretty hard to miss - is that I never did most things.

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I was only in public school from K-6, and incidentally, that was entirely at a single school which used an open outdoor plan. That means that I have no idea what literally any aspect of high school is like, nor do I have any memories associated with using a locker, running through school hallways or being inside a single building all day. We never moved, so I do not know what it's like to go to "a new school." I've also only been on a school bus about six times (all for field trips) because I lived very close to school and just walked there.

After sixth grade, my mother pulled me out of school and I spent the rest of my lower education being homeschooled. I had no friends. I basically did not see a peer for five years. I sat at a computer continuously, except when reading books. One can debate homeschooling some other time, it varies too widely in quality to judge wholesale, but in my case the benefits it conferred were offset by my total isolation from both pop culture and, well, normal human behavior.

My parents were and are nerds. They did not go out and do anything, especially with other people. My dad did not have a Rec Room and he did not have Friends Over. He explained to me how laser printers worked, but he did not show me how to tie knots or fish, and he did not teach me how to play poker.

With no friends to show me the ropes of card games, and nobody to play them with, I never learned how they work. At all. I simply never learned how a standard 52-card deck functions, what the card values are, or how to play any game that uses them. Standard Playing Cards have been a cipher to me for my entire life.

I have read about blackjack on Wikipedia and I sorta get it but have never played it. I first played poker when I was 28 - a friend came to a party and said they wouldn't mind teaching me. I had to ask for reminders on virtually every uh, round? Is that what you call them? Turn? Anyway, I enjoyed it immensely, but I could not keep it in my head, and I have since forgotten how it works almost entirely.

I also never learned how to play solitaire.

Card Clueless

My mother played Solitaire nearly incessantly when I was a child, only changing tracks when Bejeweled came out (she has been hopelessly addicted to Popcap games for twenty years at this point.)

I recently rediscovered, by accident, the exact version of Solitaire that she used to play on our 386 AT-clone PC: Solitaire Royale, published by Spectrum Holobyte in 1987.

That was probably when she bought it, but she was still playing that exact version well into my early memory. I know the same machine had Windows 3 installed, and that she knew how to use it, so I'm certain she chose this DOS program over Microsoft's watershed 16-bit GUI implementation, perhaps because it simply looked more appealing.

Solitaire Royale ran in EGA, with 16 colors at 320x200, and an unpleasant looking, vertically stretched mouse cursor. The background was stark black for no reason I can ascertain, since they could have gone with dark green. This design choice, the black background, inspired in me a perennial fascination with the game.

It seemed like it took place inside a void, and yet there was a menu system with dark purple lines and bright yellow text in a very unusual font. It felt like there was a System at hand, and I wanted to know more about it, to interact with it. This may have been the first "GUI" that I became hopelessly obsessed with from a distance.

I had watched my mother type SOLIT to launch the game, so at age 6 I would sometimes go in, turn on the computer with the huge red paddle switch, type SOLIT, and mouse around the menus. But that's as far as I got - I did not know how to play the game, and when I watched my mother play it, I did not understand what she was doing. She never explained, and I never asked, because she looked incredibly bored and distant.

Many years went by, and frankly, that impression stuck with me. I knew it was unusual that I didn't know how to play solitaire, but I didn't care to. I was actually extremely judgmental about it - and I'm still not convinced I was wrong.

It seemed to me that computer* solitaire was a weird, childish kind of defiance: a game nobody actually enjoyed, one that was never what you wanted to be doing right now, and was played only because it was on every computer, so people would seek it out simply as a way to actively avoid work.

* The idea that this game could be played with real cards, and that people probably do that, did not occur to me until my late 20s.

Not that I was at all free of sin in that regard, I was and am a champion work-avoider, and I have done some very silly things to fill time, but I felt like I saw everyone lying to themselves about it.

In Popular Culture[1], people talk about Windows Solitaire as if it's a blast to play. I've never believed them. I have always had a severe lack of patience for people bullshitting themselves, and this used to lead to me showing my ass a lot more, by declaring that total strangers were showing poor emotional maturity on no evidence other than a gut feeling.

But even as I got better about making those assumptions, this one stuck with me: Solitaire, I always suspected, is not fun, so much as it's just not work - there's a difference, and people should be honest about it.

I was, and still am, prone to snap judgments about peoples motivations. I have improved, though. I used to unapologetically feel that anyone playing solitaire should either acknowledge that they are doing it entirely out of spite, or go do something better with their time. I have since, fortunately, dispensed with all notions that, uh, well, that... playing solitaire is a personal failure. Which, is good. But I have still never fully shaken the notion that nobody really enjoys it that much.

Throughout all of this Growing And Learning, however, I was acutely aware that I lacked a critical piece of info: I had simply never played the game.

Even at my uninformedly-smuggest, I knew I couldn't be sure that Solitaire sucked without knowing how to play it. Occasionally, when working on an old computer with Windows 3 or 95, I would open it and poke around a little, if nobody was looking, quietly hoping I could intuit the rules and finally understand what I had been watching other people do with thousand-yard stares for decades. But I made no headway.

This probably contributed to my imagined disdain for the game: When I saw other people playing it, it seemed like they were just making arbitrary moves, based on no logic I could see. That made me feel stupid.

Experimentation yielded no repeatable results; I couldn't make heads or tails of the rules through guesswork. And though I looked up the rules several times, they seemed impossibly complex as-written. So I remained completely unfamiliar with even the most basic rules of the game.

And I was always acutely aware of how strange that made me.

A Nerd, Interminably

It is beyond wild to make it into your thirties not knowing something that everyone else seems to know implicitly

Something that is so indelibly universal that it would be incredibly pathetic to try to paint it as some kind of "normie thing" that you're avoiding out of intellectual pride

To have failed to learn it on your own, perhaps because your low-key embarrassment prevents you from really engaging (because it makes you feel even sillier when it doesn't immediately make sense)

To be the guy in the corner of the thinkpad meme thinking, "playing cards are gibberish to me but the party people will never know".

This is an incredibly strange way to live, and I can tell you because it's how I am about almost everything.

I have not seen that movie. I have not heard that song. I have not been there or done that, and I have no idea when anything happened. I floated through my childhood and teens and twenties, experiencing bits and pieces of pop culture and media, out of sequence, with no context for when they came out or whether they were still Relevant.

Growing up, I had no idea what movies were new because I had learned to mute TV ads by age 7 and I didn't go to theaters (I have been twice in my life, and consider the experience miserable and pointless.) Every movie I saw until age 19 was a VHS tape that my parents rented - most commonly, 80s action movies. I had a brief period of Film Enthusiasm in my late teens but mostly watched stuff from before I was born. I have never seen a movie that was "new."

I never bought a single CD or tape. I listened to the radio, but the songs just blended together in my head; few stood out enough to remember distinctly. I had a CD of the Top Gun soundtrack, a Beach Boys box set, and Simon And Garfunkels Collected Works. That's what I listened to, repeatedly, until Napster came out. Then I didn't know what to search for, other than the occasional song I finally recognized on the radio, or Weird Al. Up until my 20s, everything I listened to was what we'd now call meme music, stuff like Smash Mouth, Oasis or Sir Mix-A-Lot that I learned about only because it was comically overplayed or just comical.

And I did not watch sports.

I cannot name a time in my life when I saw my dad interact with or discuss a sport of any kind. I know that sometimes baseball would appear on TV, but he would never comment on it, and I don't think it lasted more than ten minutes before he changed the channel. I was never encouraged to join any teams and was not in school long enough to be strongarmed into any of them.

Until about two years ago, I did not understand the basic rules of baseball or hockey, and I was pretty sure that everyone was lying about being able to understand what is happening during a football game. I mean, I knew you were supposed to hit the baseball with the bat, smack the puck into the net, and... do something with the football at one end of the field or the other. But I didn't understand enough to watch or discuss anything.

I simply never had any reason to learn these games - my parents did not watch them, I had no friends who followed them, I had nobody to discuss them with, and having been deeply reclusive in elementary school and never set foot in a high school, I had never played any of them. I occasionally tried to watch a game, but they were pure gibberish to me.

And, of course, I was a nerd, someone who said "sportsball." I still am, to an extent - there was a meaning behind that mocking term before it got picked up by people at the other end of the social spectrum from the ones it was making fun of, people we all detest just as much and who rapidly rendered the word insufferable.

I still think however that a great number of people are obsessed with sports because they're violent, mean dumbasses who need an outlet for the rage produced by their own embarrassment at not understanding anything going on around them or their own fragile emotional state. Those are "sportsball guys" and I still mock them.

But, of course, I'm not a fucking child anymore, so I no longer believe in my infinite smugness that all Sports Fans are like that. As I started making friends as a proper adult - rather than the ones from my early 20s who exclusively sat around the house, played videogames, and scoffed at everything other than that - I met people who were Just Like Me, but who liked baseball or hockey or even football.

They spoke about those games no differently than the prototypical Sportsball Guy, and I had to reconcile the fact that these were intelligent, emotionally mature people who I cared about and respected. I had to accept that sports were not what I was mad at, and eventually, that led to me becoming curious about whether I could enjoy these as my friends did.

A Nerd Relenting

So, a couple years ago, for Reasons, I decided to make the leap - to learn how to enjoy sports. All of them, at once, except basketball, which was ironically the only one I already understood. I just found it boring and still do.

I sat down and had my girlfriend explain baseball and hockey and football. We watched games together, and I said things like "so that's icing, right?" and "he made it to first base but it's still a force-out because someone caught the ball before it hit the ground, right?"

Eventually, I found myself saying things like "wow, you have to see this, they just got a triple play because the outfielder bobbled the easiest catch in history," unbidden. I was alluding to game events being "unprecedented," or an umpire being "a dumbshit," because I felt like I actually knew enough to recognize those things.

Suddenly, I was a sports fan, after nearly 30 years of watching other people and thinking they were all a different species than me.

I rewatched Jon Bois' videos, with the better understanding I now had, and suddenly they made more sense. I had liked them the first time around because he was a good storyteller; now I enjoyed them because I understood the significance of the events. I was on the inside track, I knew the secret code that everyone around me had been speaking for years, while I listened and either nodded, scoffed or laughed, based on my best guess of their body language and tone.

I'm still not really a sports fan. I have watched some games on my own, yes, but not many, and they usually don't hold my attention. I would struggle through most conversations with someone who actually followed baseball, and would be reluctant to comment on a game if I was with anyone I didn't trust fully, because I would commit a malapropism and get made fun of. But I can absolutely hold my own end of the conversation at a hockey party, and that's just wild to me. I can barely recognize this part of myself.

Curiously, the game I internalized best was golf. I can watch a whole golf broadcast, and I have. I can talk shop, particularly about rules, and to some extent players and equipment.

The game I internalized least was football, because as I found out, it really is stupid and incomprehensible. It has the most maddeningly complex set of rules, all bafflingly arbitrary, all of which scream, "we misdesigned this from the word go and have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper for a century."

American football is the dumbest, least-watchable game in existence, and even knowing how it works now, I'm still convinced that nobody can actually tell what's going on. But I do at least know how to react if someone tells me the score and what down they're on.

It has been wild crossing this gulf. But I have crossed it. And so, when Last Call BBS put a very slick stack of VGA-esque cards in front of me over a beautifully chill soundtrack, I was finally emotionally prepared to learn Solitaire.

The Way We Learn Things

Last Call BBS is a Zachtronics game that came out earlier this year. I bought it because it (seemingly) promised an interesting, lowkey narrative set in an AU that combined elements of retrocomputing, the BBS era, and funky Japanese computers you've never heard of. It didn't quite pan out like that, and mostly just ended up being a collection of little Zachtronics games, which I've never had the brains for.

But an interesting quirk about this particular title is that none of those games are available at the outset. You have to "download" each one, and there's an enforced delay - so you have to kill time. And what's on every computer that's good for killing time? Solitaire.

I believe I've heard that Zachtronics includes a solitaire implementation in most of their titles, but since I've never played any of the others, that was moot. Here, however, I was sitting in front of a new, intriguing videogame Experience, trying to immerse myself in it, but staring at a several minute countdown timer before I could actually "do anything." And I wanted to play as intended.

So, about a month before my 34th birthday, I turned to my girlfriend and said, "Honey, I have no idea how to play Solitaire, but I want to Do This Right. Can you teach me?"

I picked it up in about ten minutes (as one would expect, given that it's one of the most popular videogames in history) and within half an hour I had won a couple games.

At noon that day, playing cards were greek to me. By 1PM, I could recognize that I was building neural pathways around this new skill. I have never learned a language other than English, so I can only guess, but I suspect it is similar to the feeling when you are learning Spanish or French or Japanese, and find yourself reading a line of text and garden-pathing it, guessing the final meaning before you finish the sentence, because your brain is building the prediction engine that underpins natural language.

I had unlocked the secret, and the truths of the world were laid bare.

It's really not a joke. If you haven't had the kind of "soft-isolated" life that I've had - a life in which you're here, you have access to everything that everyone else seems to, but none of it was ever for you - then I can't tell you what it feels like, to finally feel...

Normal.

To no longer feel like an alien walking amongst the humans. To no longer hear someone make an offhand quip, hear someone else laugh, and know that they have a shared experience that they simply assume I have as well. "I spent like three hours playing solitaire instead of..." is simply a part of reality as far as most people are concerned.

And now it's part of mine. I got the reference before, but now I have lived the reference. Prior to this, it was something I filed away under vanilla, under normie, under boring, drab, a way to fill time when you have nothing else, default, and many other things.

And now I am doing it. I am playing a card game. And I feel. Normal. In a way I have always avoided.

Call it petty, making mountains out of molehills, but it's something so pervasive and apparently so simple, something that has lurked in the background of every single computer I have ever used yet remained completely inaccessible to me. It was only a mild frustration, but after nearly three decades of it, it felt like part of me.

Just as it felt impossible to imagine myself talking about hockey enthusiastically - not just Getting By, but actually having my own thoughts and observations about what was going on in a game - it felt impossible to imagine that I could look at sol.exe and go "oh this game is going well," or have my own thoughts and observations on it.

Because, of course, that's how you know you're actually familiar with something - when you have your own opinions on it.

About two hours after I first played Solitaire, I had concluded that it was one of the worst games in the genre and nobody should play it. I think it's a stupid game, designed to be as frustrating and unsatisfying as possible, and I am once again wondering if anyone actually enjoys it.

The Chess Of Solitaire

First we have to address why Solitaire sucks. And to be clear, it doesn't - Klondike is what sucks.

Any card game you can play by yourself is a "solitaire," but Microsoft didn't bother being specific with the window name they chose in 1990 for their implementation of one specific solitaire game called Klondike, so that's what we all think of now when we hear the word. Freecell is also a solitaire, as are Spider, Pyramid and many others.

I am new to all of these, but I can assure you: Klondike is a bad game. At first, I just assumed I was new and sucked at it, but after I put in some hours and decided I had a good feel for the game, I found myself thinking, "this seems incredibly hard." It turns out that it is.

The Wiki page literally opens with this:

Klondike, also known as Canfield, is a card game for one player and the best known and most popular version of the patience or solitaire family,[2] something which "defies explanation" as it has one of the lowest rates of success of any such game.[3]

When the wiki page for a game opens with something this overt, instead of a mealy-mouthed "Some Critics Consider," you know it sucks.

Klondike is nondeterministic, and immune to strategy. There are no guarantees that any given game is winnable, and even if it is, you have little influence on that outcome. This is due to two design elements:

• It is possible to put yourself in an unwinnable situation by stacking cards in the wrong sequence.

• Because most of the cards are hidden, it is impossible to determine which sequence is correct.

You cannot be consistently good at Klondike, because it contains elements of chance. You can't strategize, because the game simply doesn't let you see more than one row of cards at a time. You can't know if a move is the right one until you've made it and can't take it back. So Klondike is guaranteed to regularly leave you painted into corners and feeling stupid, despite there being no way for you to avoid it.

The feeling I was getting after a few hours was like... trying to walk through a hoarder house, where there's just a narrow path between the junk. You're surrounded on all sides, only able to move in one predetermined direction. You twist your foot and it jams in place between two boxes. You can't turn around. You have no freedom, no room for creativity, only the illusion of self-determination. You do what is obvious; your only verbs are "look for match" and "make match."

I may be oversimplifying, but I think it's a valid analysis, certainly in comparison to Freecell: The Chess Of Solitaire. I think Freecell is a much smarter, much fairer, much less mean game. I think it's a better way to waste your time, and it's a god damn shame that Microsoft only added it in Windows 95. It's funny, actually - not nearly as many people used Win3, yet its sole card game is the one that caught on.

Infuriating. Because Freecell... is good.

It's a fully deterministic game. Not all deals are winnable, but pretty much every implementation excludes deals that aren't. This leaves hundreds of thousands of winnable games.

Like Klondike, you can make wrong moves and leave the game in an unwinnable state. But you also know, going in, that each game can be won, which means it actually is your fault if you lose. That may not feel great, but it's fair. Even more fair, because all cards are visible at the outset - so you can strategize.

It is possible to look at the starting configuration of the board, then play an entire game inside your head, identifying all the right moves before beginning to execute them (assuming you have that much mental stack space.) Few people would, at least to that extreme, but it's possible, and certainly anyone can learn to plan a couple moves ahead of where they are, which is impossible in Klondike.

The basic rules are similar, however:

• Your goal is to stack all cards into four piles in the upper right corner, each containing only one suit, with Ace on the bottom and King on the top.

• The game begins with the deck randomly scattered into eight columns.

• The cards on the "top" of each column (that is, the bottommost ones on the screen) are free to move.

• You can move any free card onto any other, as long as they are not the same color, and the lower card has a higher value. (a black 2 can go on top of a red 3, or a red queen can go on top of a black king)

• You can move multiple cards at once, as long as they're in-order. So you can grab a 4 that has a 3 and 2 stacked on top, and drop them all at once on a 5.

• If you manage to sort an entire suit onto one stack, it can all be moved to the finished piles, leaving a column blank. You can then start a new pile there.

• If a free card is the next one that needs to go on a finished stack, you can put it there at any time. So if you have a pile in the corner with the ace of clubs and two of clubs, and then you expose a three of clubs, you can drag it to the pile, removing it from the board.

That's how Klondike is played. Freecell modifies the rules:

• There are now four "free cells" in the upper left, each of which can hold a single card of any type. You can simply put any card here if you want, and take it out if you want.

• When you empty a column in Klondike, the only card you can place there is a king. If you have no kings free, then the column must remain empty. Freecell lets you place any card in any blank space.

• When moving multiple cards, you can only move one, plus the number of free spaces, whether those are cells or empty columns. So, if you have two empty free cells, and one empty column, you can move a stack of four cards (sorted e.g. 5-4-3-2.) You would not be able to pick up a five card stack, or an unsorted stack (going e.g. 5-J-9-8.)

These changes alone make Freecell a hundred times easier, which is why I have played over two hundred games since 7/12/2022. It has gotten to the point where those new neural pathways, still fresh and overactive, are starting to do the Tetris Effect thing. I have literally seen red and black cars while driving and had the real, actual urge to drag one onto the other.

This is not to suggest that I've been playing it day and night, I'm just playing really fast rounds. Microsoft's Solitaire Collection (free with Windows, and available on Android with gobs of ads) has an excellent implementation, and you can ask it to only give you "Easy" deals. I've been sticking to those, many of which can be completed in under two minutes. So while I have not played hundreds of hours, I have played a lot of distinct games, and I've come up with some amount of strategy, despite not having thirty years of experience.

Pro Tips (For Freecell)

Being able to see all the cards is important, but if that's all you want, there's a version of Klondike called (agonizingly) Thoughtful Klondike. Wikipedia says that it's far, far more beatable.

The titular free cells, on the other hand, are what make Freecell so much more playable. They allow you to simply change the lay of the land if you don't like it, assuming you can keep them open. That's one of the big challenges you'll encounter when starting out: the temptation to immediately fill them all up.

If you're in a pinch, with no valid moves on the board, but you have a cell open, then any free card on the board can go there. That means you can then ask "would removing a card from any column help me out?" Or, if you have multiple cells open, "where is a card I need next? can I dig down to it?"

The problem with this is that free cells are a resource; if you fill them up, you won't be able to move multi-card stacks, which is essential. This affects strategy tremendously. The cells are not really free; you need to think about how you intend to use them.

Here is my Freecell Advice:

• Make a beeline for the aces and twos when starting a game. Whatever you have to do to unbury them, do it, or you will find yourself in a situation where you've half-sorted several stacks, but now you have 12 cards sitting on top of an ace. This is hard to get out of.

• Avoid putting anything in the free cells for as long as possible after starting a game. Make as many matches and get rid of as many cards as you can before setting something aside.

• Try to avoid putting a card in a free cell unless you have a plan to get it out. If you want to store a 6 because it'll free up a nine that you really need, look around for a 7 first, or a way to make one accessible within the next couple moves. If you don't see either, ignore that juicy nine and look for other options you can pursue first..

• Sometimes however, you're just stuck. Maybe there's an ace under a queen, and if you can just free it up, 5 other cards will pop into the finished stacks immediately. Go for it. You may not know how you're going to get that queen back onto the board, but clearing cards gives you more breathing room, so it's worth it. Just try not to do it twice in a row.

• Remember that the bigger a card is, the harder it is to get out of a free cell. The only way to get a king out for instance is to an empty space, so once it's in, it's there for good until you clear an entire column.

• Don't give up easily. That sounds trite, but you'd be surprised how often a board can look unsolveable when it isn't. You can recover from lots of jams. An ace buried under three kings isn't as irretrievable as it looks.

• Remember that this is a complex game: you're considering rank, suit, color, and multiple destinations for every move, so when you get stuck, make sure you've checked everything. Maybe there's a card on top of a stack that could actually be moved to a finished pile.

• If you've filled all four free cells, you'll feel pretty trapped. It sucks! This is what Klondike always feels like! But remember that they can get emptied as quickly as they were filled.

• Don't ignore "useless" moves when stuck. Sometimes you have two seemingly identical stacks, except one has an extra card on top. You can move it between them, and that move seems pointless, but maybe the card that gets uncovered is one that can go to a finished pile.

I Am An Expert On Everything I Just Discovered

Isn't it remarkable how you can learn how to do something, then immediately act like King Shit about it?

In June I didn't know that solitaire cards needed to alternate colors. A month later I had a stick up my ass about Klondike being a bad game, and now I'm writing my own strategy guide for Freecell and declaring it intellectually superior. And far be it from me to act humble - I think I'm right! You should play Freecell! I think it's fun and mentally stimulating!

That's the point of learning something new, right? It's not just to be vaguely aware of it. You want to be an expert. I came here to win, as it were. I don't want to just notionally be Familiar with something - if I'm going to bother to learn anything about it, I intend to have Strong Opinions a week later, even if they're wrong. It's pretty much why I'm able to make youtube videos.