pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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.


britown
@britown

Was up all night playing freecell.

If, like me, you began your freecell journey with this post, here's something I was confused on but makes sense now: the limit to how many of an ordered stack you can move at once isn't so much a special rule as it is just a consequence of the main rule which is that you can only move one card at a time.

If you have 4 free cells, you could take an ordered stack of 5 (e.g. blk J, red 10, blk 9, red 8, blk 7), move the first 4 one at a time into your free cells, move the 5th card to your desired position, and then reverse-order fill back in. Apps will speed this up by just saying you can move stacks sized up to freecell+1 cards.

The tricky part is that an empty column actually doubles the moveable stack size. This is because you could move half of your stack to the free column first, and then move the other half to the destination and move the first half back on top. You don't, then get this doubling if you're using your free column as your target destination!

The rules for moveable ordered stack size are (FreeCells + 1) x (FreeColumns¹ + 1)

¹ Empty columns not being used as your destination

This is confusing and hard to understand but made more sense when I realized it's just a shortcut for shuffling around cards one at a time.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

<imo>
I think a thing you're missing about the blank stare you describe with klondike ("Solitaire" in the coloquial sense) is that it's closer to mediation for many people, especially the sort of people "meditation doesn't work for" because it wasnt described to them in a way they could understand.

the winning never seems to matter, when i look at the age group that could be parents of thirty year olds, and much of gen x that followed them.

it's hard drive defragmentation, a way to occupy the fidgety and virtual brainparts so they can get out of the way, same way many of us use, dare i say, "higher brow video games". or photography, or whatever. it's tetris effect for people who a GUI just blew the minds of. it was accessible and it worked if it didn't frustrate you.

they aren't playing to win, the winning is, if anything, value neutral. they're restarting either way, because they're playing for the process
</imo>

but yeah as a game freecell is far superior. in ways that, i think, take away from the meditative potential

I gotta say: I fucking hate Freecell, and that is in no way the game's fault. My brain isn't wired for it, every card sitting out like that is just completely overwhelming to me. I could write a backtracking solver for it but I can't play it at all. My game is Tripeaks.

And I think part of the thing with Klondike that at least some people like, myself included, is that it is heavily chance-based. I'm pretty okay at it, and I like playing it sometimes as something I really can't be capital-g Good at If I Just Work Harder. You win or you don't and then you shuffle the deck again.

I view Klondike Solitaire as basically being Slot Machines With Extra Steps. While my play has some influence on the outcome of the game, it's 90% determined when I press the button to shuffle the deck, and the game itself is basically watching (with clicking) the cards fall into place to see if I've won.

Which is not to say that it's a good game, or even a "game" in the sense that freecell or chess or starcraft is. But, y'know, slot machines are popular. And the Extra Steps are transformative. It's got a place, Freecell has a place, they are in no way replacements for each other.

Don't get me wrong, there's no reason that slot machines should be appealing. It honestly seems like it's a bug in our wetware (around which have spun multiple billion-dollar industries).

It still makes me feel better to notice that two things that don't make sense resemble each other. If they're actually the same thing, that's a net-reduction in things which don't make sense!

What bothers me about it is that it's not pure chance. If it was either a "click the screen to see things move in an interesting algorithmic way, producing tiny hits of serotonin", or if it was a deterministic game where I knew I wasn't wasting my time, either would make sense to me. I don't understand what's appealing about the combination; something which you have to put thought into or you'll definitely lose, but even if you do, you have no idea whether it's accomplishing anything. I sorta get why folks are saying it's meditative, but... my brain just cannot cope with a task that may be pointless. This describes the root cause of an enormous swath of problems in my life.

I enjoy some games that combine skill and luck. Part of the fun is handling luck requires skill: making room for good luck to help, and controlling how bad luck hinders you. (I'm not really into Klondike, so I don't know how much of the skill/luck interplay it has.)

I view Klondike Solitaire as basically being Slot Machines With Extra Steps.

Yes, this is exactly right. IIRC, they had a "gambling mode" you could turn on to track your "winnings" Spoiler alert: You always lose lots of money. Klondike is designed to be unwinnable in the aggregate so you lose money.

i actually distinctly remember watching a friend play klondike with a physical deck of cards somewhere around grade 2, thinking “wow thats a cool idea”, trying it for myself back home and thinking “wow computers make a lot of stuff easier huh”

I had a similar reaction to Klondike—this makes no sense and I can lose through no fault of my own, so fuck this—and ended up falling in love with Eight Off, I think on one of my old Palms. Like FreeCell, every implementation I've ever seen is guaranteed winnable. The strategy, however, is pretty much the opposite of what you describe for FreeCell: I fare best (i.e., always win) when I play to clean up/organize the tableau, making sometimes horrifyingly tall stacks of ordered cards from King down to Ace, forgoing short-term deliveries that would lead to dead ends in favor of moves that make the space tidier and create (or at least conserve) opportunities.

in reply to @britown's post:

hahaha see this is the bit that was obvious to me! I still suck at the game tho

like you beat Sawayama Solitaire twice in your first thirty minutes? I've been playing solitaire approximately as long as I've been using computers, and I have one win after a few hours spent on Sawayama alone. :/

this specific mechanic is way more obvious in (at least old) windows versions of freecell, which do a really fast animation of zooming the cards into the appropriate free spaces and ending up at the destination instead of pretending that it was a single motion

OK, but, Sawayama Solitaire in Last Call BBS fixes Klondike. The combo of having full information and allowing anything to be moved onto blank spaces, not just kings, actually makes it winnable like at least 75% of the time, even as it tightens the screws by not allowing deck cycling. And you pretty much either lose fast because everything is stuck, or are rewarded for your patience and careful forethought with the knot exquisitely untangling itself all at once. I'm fast approaching 100 wins.

As for the question of "does anyone actually enjoy it"? Solitaire, Minesweeper and Picross all belong to a certain category of game, the constraint-solving puzzle, which more or less hijacks my brain. It is the only type of game for which nothing ever changes, I repeatedly perform the same actions, I do not learn new things or improve, and yet I do not get bored. I will keep doing it as long as I let myself. I would say I enjoy this activity in small doses, but if I'm spending a lot of time playing one of these games, it has probably more or less turned into self-harm. I was EXTREMELY UPSET when I finally finished Picross 3D on the 3DS and it "rewarded" me with a bunch of new puzzles to solve. I was finally going to be free of you! You motherfucker!!