Kicking off my attempt to cover as many solitaire games in the 2023 Traditional Deck Game Design Contest, Sandcastle Solitaire is not just any column-piling game. True to the name, these cards are now made of sand and can collapse, not to mention the tide kicking in.
Each turn you draw and play a row of cards onto columns and discard some cards into a discard pile. You must start your row on an existing column can only play it in either the order drawn or the other way around. If a card is played onto a face-up card it must either be higher or the same suit lest the entire column collapse and all its cards flip. After playing your row, you discard half the number of live columns in cards from the draw pile. This cycle continues until the deck runs out. If you have more face-up cards than discarded cards you win.
Easy enough rules to get the hang of while having some flexibility in trying out different plays(you can draw a row from 1 to 7 cards), the game's strategy includes both foreplanning how many cards to draw and which columns to save and tactical considerations in choosing how to play the row and what losses can be taken.
In my playthroughs so far I have played with long rows which meant risking inevitably losing columns as extending the tableau means more discards to try to outnumber. Someone in the linked thread used a more conservative strategy that requires precise card-counting. Most games end with close margins but is not at all unpredictable as it would seem.
The game can be played with jokers: they don't have a suit and represent the highest card in a column, a joker played as the first card of a column immediately collapses.
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