~ MamakTalk ~: Spider Solitaire Challenge Features Custom Decks Made With MIT, Encyclopedia Britannica

2021年6月1日星期二

Spider Solitaire Challenge Features Custom Decks Made With MIT, Encyclopedia Britannica

There are lots and lots of different versions of Solitaire, and they all featured in last year’s Solitaired, from entrepreneurial developers X and Y.

Now the team has decided to simplify. Spider Solitaire Challenge takes just one Solitaire variant and lets it shine on its own personal stage.

Chances are, the only version of Solitaire you’ve played is Klondike, the default game that came bundled with billions of copies of Microsoft Windows through the nineties and noughties.

Spider Solitaire is a much more interesting proposition, with a difficulty level that ranges from “fairly straightforward” to “mind-bogglingly impossible”. Here’s how it works.

You’re playing with two complete decks, which makes 104 cards in total. 54 of these cards are dealt at the outset, in ten random columns, with the top card in each column exposed. At any point you can deal another card, face up, onto each of these columns.

The goal is to rearrange these randomly shuffled cards into nice neat numerically ordered stacks, and this is a fairly simple task when there’s only one suit on the table.

Things take a turn when you add another suit. While it’s possible to place a card of any suit down on a card carrying the next ascending number, you can only move the resulting stack of cards if they also belong to the same suit.

This devilish twist forces you to be ultra-cautious about where you place your cards. The apparently safe haven of a red six might be tempting when you need somewhere to dump a black five, but that five can all too easily become an immovable obstacle that brings the whole machine grinding to a halt.

As well as being an excellent Solitaire variant, Spider Solitaire Challenge is an illuminating education resource. X and Y have partnered up with institutions like Encyclopedia Britannica, MIT, Who2 and others to create themed decks celebrating great human beings.

There’s a deck full of leading figures from the women’s suffrage movement, a deck showcasing heroes of the civil rights movement, a deck containing great inventors, a deck for notable women in computing, and more besides.

To check them out, play Spider Solitaire Challenge for free online or download it from the Google Play Store.

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