Quick review: Canfield

If you know one solitaire, chances are it's Klondike, but you're more likely to call it the Solitaire. Thanks to Microsoft, this form of solitaire has made itself the de facto standard, and to many it's the only form they know. As to why this piece starts this way, by virtue of this amount of familiarity Klondike is also the go-to solitaire for many, which as also the case for me, but with an expansion of solitaire knowledge comes a change in preferred defaults. Whenever I decide to play solitaire nowadays I tend to default to Canfield.

Generally seen as a casino-type game thanks to the popular origin story, Canfield is played with a single deck of cards. Deal one 13-card reserve, then a starting card for the foundations then below it a row of four cards for the starting tableau. Three cards are dealt from the stock  every time. Cards are built down on the tableau in alternating color while foundations are built upward by suit, wrapping around from king to ace if need be. If a column of the tableau clears the top card from the reserve fills it, otherwise the top card from the waste pile. You win if all cards are placed on the foundations.

Don't expect to get every card in every time. Heck, don't expect to get that many cards in whenever you play this. The success rate of Canfield is terribly low and there is little sense of progress during play. Most of your time playing will be reshuffling the deck for a new session, a more likely scenario than a complete game.

But why would I keep playing an infuriating game where frustration happens more often than fun? Why would I choose this game as the thing I'd play on my own whenever I pick up a deck of cards? It's small. The layout at the start takes up only a few square feet and is smaller than Klondike. The small layout size also allows for a fast start, fitting for the equally fast end you'll get most of the time.

Quick Review: Baker's Dozen

A deck has 52 cards in it, which factors at 2 x 2 x 13, leaving little room for any even rectangles when making a solitaire. Tableaus of unusual shapes inevitably pop up thanks to this arbitrary restriction, but people have been trying to make rectangular layouts happen anyway. 

A classic example of a game with a perfectly rectangular layout is Baker's Dozen. It is an open-information foundation-building solitaire, like Freecell or Beleaguered Castle. Cards are laid down in a tableau consisting of thirteen columns of four cards, with the goal of building up the foundations upwards by suit. Cards on the tableau are built downward regardless of suit, and no cards can be played on empty tableau space (kings are shifted to the bottom before play to avoid obvious lockouts).

Once you move a card you can no longer return it to its previous position unless it's also legal, making this game a matter of deep sequencing. One wrong move and you risk walling important cards, so expect a lot of finessing for the sake of digging out an ace or a two. Thanks to the amount of consequences reverberating from a past action, expect a decent amount of failed plays, though once you unlock everything and stack everything properly the cards will indeed fall into place.

The main issue with this relative brain burner is the space it takes, but as a solitaire, it's a great brain-burner, this can also be generalized into other decks as long as you start with columns four tall.

10 years of Shibumi (Draft)

In an attempt to conceptualize his studies on distilling game rules and using computers to synthesize them, Cameron Browne designed a fully-defined game system that is compact enough for computers to handle spatially but with enough complexity to be interesting. These efforts gave birth to a 4x4 board with stackable balls: Shibumi.

As a physical set, one only needs a board consisting of sixteen cavities in an evenly-spaced 4x4 arrangement and balls of the same size in three different colors: black, white and red. A possible fourth color, yellow, has been floated as a possible addition. Visually, the set is peak minimalism, even if you play with various balls and boards it still stands on its own, the spheres commanding its aesthetic. Its main feature though is its inherent depth: All of its 30 points are not fully available at once, these points are only available under conditions inherent to the physical set.

Add a precise glossary of terms and a the Shibumi system is ready for play. Keeping things simple, these features are inherent in the physical nature of the set and come intuitively in play. True to its abstract nature, nothing is left to chance and only moves with one certain outcome are legal, though games with randomness have utilized other factors instead.

To give the new system more bang for its buck, a contest was held to collect an initial set of rules made by humans, not only to seed the algorithms but to give the fledgling set a bunch of games for people to play with on the get-go. While Shibumi may be simple enough for someone to rediscover its concepts by scratch, a starting corpus of games is a necessity the same way you need to know at least one card game to get any use from a deck of cards.

The contest was a success, the resulting creations both stretched the capabilities of the system but also the imaginations of designers, who have to deal with reductions in size and abstraction. That various genres and goals can come out of a small playing area and color set is a conceptual marvel not only of the set but of abstracts in general. To compare, stone-placement games based on the Go set are either connection games or area games.

Sadly, after this competition, only a handful of new games popped up on BGG, and the synthesized games are yet to appear; the project itself put on hold. Fortunately, with the launch of Browne's project Ludii, new games may be on its way, and maybe, just maybe, we will see what machine-generated innovations will appear.

In 2020, Emil Danielsen presented nine new games of his own making for the set, after a lull of four years. Not restricting himself merely to abstract fare, Danielsen also approaches the set as a physical object and adds a dexterity game and a game that doesn't even require the board. It might annoy some that such games be included (although one Challenge entry is also a dexterity game, that one focused on ball-rolling and needed a slope), but thinking beyond the system's limits is something humans have excelled in doing; computers can only work within the rules they are given.

Clever yet underlooked, the Shibumi set was made to challenge computers, but it's yet to complete its first task of challenging us.