After remembering that PySolFC exists, redownloading it, and being completely amazed by the background music, I inevitably fell back into the pattern of actually just playing solitaire again. And then, while looking through the other variants of solitaire included in the program, I had an idea: what if I went through every single one, and played until I was able to win? What divine truths of solitaire could I uncover by becoming the master of every solitaire in existence?

But there's over 1000 of them and most of the variants are practically the same thing, so I decided on a much more achievable goal: I would win the variants in the "Popular games" menu, which I assumed to represent all the solitaires that actually matter. There were only 21 of these, so this would be much more manageable - after all, Klondike is fairly simple to win, so how much time could it possibly take? I would survey the landscape of popular solitaire variants, and come away with the knowledge and experience of someone who's beaten them all.

I did not end up finishing this task.

In roughly the order that I played them, these are the variants I attempted, and the number of games/the number of wins:

• Klondike (4/1)
  I played this one before actually beginning on the adventure, just because it's there. I wonder if Klondike is actually one of the easiest of the games here, or if it just seems that way because it's the one I have proper experience with. Much of that experience was from playing Nerts! Online, which I do recommend.
• Picture Gallery (4/1)
  I remember this game from the last time I tried PySol, which was some years ago. At the time it was the only game aside from Klondike that I actually bothered to learn how to play. It's fairly easy, but at least moderately entertaining. if I had to pick a favourite out of all the variants it would be this.
• Aces Up (23/0)
  Is terrible. But very compelling.
  This game has made me even more convinced that I should never attempt gambling.
  It's easy to get stuck in a "just one more game" loop with this one. Weirdly, thinking "just two more games" makes it easier to stop after the second.
• Baker's Dozen (13/1)
  I can barely remember anything about this game, despite playing it a... 13 times. Why is it called that?
• Braid (4/1)
  Looks intimidating (and is described as "harder" in the manual), isn't actually that bad. Kind of fun, really. I won on my third game, but that might have been a fluke.
• Canfield (5/1)
  Another game I don't seriously recall playing. Also won quickly.
• Forty Thieves (29/0?)
  Pretty hard. Not that intimidating, just seems to require a fair bit of luck. I'm sure there is a good strategy for this but I can't work it out.
  The single time I won on this game was shortly before the single time that my entire computer crashed (I guess it probably didn't crash because of PySol then), so my win didn't get recorded in the statistics.
  I know I won, it's not like I need the statistics in the program to validate my quest, but for some reason I went back and played like 20 more games just to try to get it recorded.
• FreeCell (4/1)
  First one alphabetically I'd actually heard of before! Though only vaguely. Apparently this is a popular one with history tied to the history of computer solitaire. Probably thanks to the fact that almost every game is solvable, I managed to actually find a solution within three games, and thus can't remember much more about it than that.
• Golf (11/0)
  This game always makes me think of those bizarre mobile game ads. Having played it, this is just another Aces Up to me. It's basically all luck. At least, it feels that way, but this might be a skill issue.
• Grounds for a Divorce (11/1)
  This one sets a new record for most bizarre name. I'm going to assume it's a really good pun in the original German.
  Compared to the games before it, there's a lot going on here. There are a lot of piles to look at, a lot of possible moves at any one time, and dealing generates even more things you've got to consider all at once. Seems pretty luck-based, and pretty hard, but that might just be because I make a lot of mistakes on account of how much information is always on-screen.
  Also this game makes it kind of annoying how you can't tell low numbered diamonds and hearts or spades and clubs apart when they're in piles in PySolFC without messing with the scaling.
  The manual page for this game includes the line "This is my favorite Spider variant", but there's no attribution on the page, so I'm choosing to believe that it's the favourite Spider variant of the solitaire program itself.
• Spider (1/0)
  As promised in the manual this was a lot like Grounds for a Divorce, but harder. I played once to check it out, but kept mostly to the alphabetical order.
• Gypsy (8/0)
  I definitely think this one should have a better name...
  The manual suggests using the undo function here, which I thought was a form of cheating, but it's not like anybody is able to stop you. Still though, because this game has hidden information, I stuck to playing without help.
• Mahjongg Flying Dragon (7/0)
  As a kid I always thought that "Mahjong" was just the tile-matching solitaire game, and not also a much more complicated game played with the tiles (which has the same name). Which makes me wonder if there's anybody who only knows about the typical 52-card playing card deck through Klondike solitaire.
  Anyway I have no strategy for this. I make matches as soon as I see them. This game makes my eyes hurt.
• Pyramid (3/0)
  This is another one I remember seeing in mobile game ads. Maybe it's not a coincidence that it also seems largely luck-based.
  Wikipedia states, with no source, that it's possible to win Pyramid starting from 1 in every 50 deals. Accordingly I decided to just skip on winning this one.

It was around this point that I wondered if would be better to not finish this adventure. It had already turned out to be a lot more time-consuming than I expected, and sure, I was probably getting better over time so I'd be able to complete the later variants faster, and I could skip the luck-based ones and probably not miss out on any Solitaire Knowledge, but...

I didn't know for certain how hard those other games were actually going to be, or how much time I'd have to spend on rounds of solitaire that were unsolvable from the start. If things were going to be much harder from here, that would be a lot of time. Yet maybe, if I just persist, and go back to the game, climb that mountain of solitaire variants, stand there at the summit (atop the piles of 13 cards each organised by suit in ascending order from Ace to King), and look down upon every other game in existence, I could see the whole world in a new light, and finally understand the true meaning of solitaire.

Probably not though. Better to stop now. I wasn't really having that much fun anyway. At least now I know what the "talon", "foundations", "tableau", "waste" etc. are, which I'm sure will be extremely useful outside of solitaire. Also, I've worked out that solitaire is a roguelike: randomly generated, permadeath, turn-based, and the arrangement of cards makes a grid, so I propose that solitaire variants are generally even more like Rogue than many modern roguelikes. I know of a roguelike-like solitaire game (Donsol), but playing too much solitaire here has made me wonder if putting roguelike stuff around a more traditional solitaire game could be interesting...

The main takeaway from this adventure should probably be that I definitely have better ways to spend my time. Before getting into this I read the SOFA manifesto ("Start Often Finish rArely"), and this turned out to be a first opportunity to put it into practice. Shlomi Fish, the former primary maintainer of PySolFC, left the project after computer solitaire became a "time sink" for him. So I'm calling this a speedrun of doing basically the same thing. And why did I go back to Forty Thieves after winning it but not having it recorded in the statistics anyway? Who was I trying to prove it to?

I think, maybe, that before going on this journey, Polymorphic Solitaire and Radical solitaire should have taught me that the true meaning of solitaire is playing by your own rules. The lesson from PySolFC, then, is that if you're going to follow the rules closely, often the only way to move forward is to give up.