Monday, July 4, 2022

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.

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