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.

Game Review: Card Capture

Dungeon crawls need not be complicated. Card Capture uses simple mechanics to create a thematic fight without the thematic complications. Its small layout also means less space needed to play it and fewer tabs to keep track of.

The layout consist of a draw pile representing the enemies, queued up four at a time at most. At the end of the line is the enemy's discard pile and the goal is to survive through waves of enemies without letting an ace, king, queen or jack reach it. 

Your starting arsenal is pretty weak, luckily your method of attack involves capturing cards that you can also use for further attacking. Cards of a suit can capture an equal or lower card of another suit, and jokers take on the same value as another card in your hand.

After the enemies fill their positions, you draw until your hand has four cards (after choosing to discard some or none) and either capture one card, let one card of yours be captured (discarding it and the rightmost enemy card to the enemy) or sacrifice two cards to bring any card on the line to the bottom of the enemy draw pile. Aces, kings, queen and jacks cannot be sacrificed as a consequence.

Going well with the theme, the game starts with your small force matching horribly against the enemies, in some cases forcing you to choose which of your cards will have to perish. You would prefer not to lack too much of a specific suit or you'll find yourself swamped on one front that you cannot fight in any way. Jokers are powerful; it's ability of doubling the amount of a card in your hand should not be underestimated, though you might have to rely on it more often than you want.

Once you manage to gather enough cards the rest of the game is just a matter of having enough right cards at the right time; the only thing stopping you from being OP is having four cards. Any damages taken at this point may get risky and can even cost you the game. A good sense of managing losses will go a long way.

A simple game with an adventurous sense of progress, a rougelike with a deck of cards, Card Capture will do more than that, and if you're done with your adventure, just shuffle yourself another one.

Review: Gee-Haw

A nice play on the Shut the Box mechanism, David McCord's little solitaire game Gee-Haw adds additional light strategy to an already light game.

The board has three columns of ten each from left to right, black, white and red. The pegs start in the middle white column and the goal is to put all of them on the same side column, whether red or black, before the deck runs out. A deck of cards, shuffled and drawn one-by-one determine what pegs can move where.

Pegs that total a face card's number must be moved the direction based on its color. Black means move a peg leftward, if the peg is already in the black it must move right, while red goes rightward with a peg in red moving left. The full total of the card must be played, and a peg of a value can only move at most once. Kings and queens allow you to move any one peg and jacks let you move two.

As mentioned, the game is similar to Shut the Box in that the goal is to align counters entirely from one state to another, which counters can move determined by the total of a dice roll in a finite number of moves. The main differences are that in Shut the Box lowered counters cannot revert, there is only one goal state and a roll that cannot be played in full is rendered null. This latter state is important as in Gee-Haw no turn can be skipped.

But how much strategy does Shut the Box need? 

One skill can be used for Gee-Haw: card counting. Unlike Shut the Box, you can reasonably anticipate what sorts of cards will appear that you can use to your favor. The skill/luck balance involved is less biased to the latter and thus gameplay is not as finicky.

McCord plans to retail Gee-Haw as a peg game, but what's stopping anyone from using switches?

 

KoL Miners Daughter: We are beheaded to the ball! - 9 pts
MathEquals5: Mannequin and Womannequin - 8 pts
Unameme: Taking the genre of mindless romance to the next level - 16 pts
Kemistry: Looks like we're both getting head tonight - 6 pts, 2 vts
lil jimbo: me (a mannequin) going to the royal ball with my wife (who is also a mannequin) [we forgot our heads] - 0 pts
Soxfan196o: the headless horseman and his bride - 0 pts
Gawea: This is what happens when you let your wealth go to your head. - 6 pts, 4 vts
ChristopherG: Headless Horseman's Wedding - 0 pts
Cookie Sneak: "Just a little off the top" - 5 pts
Harlequins Dance: "They're close; neck and neck." - 6 pts, 3 vts
Kill3rQu33n: "There was a moment of silence when the groom was told he may now kiss the bride" - 10 pts

		2					1		3	3			9
				3		3			2				8
3	2		3	1		2		3		2			16
					3		3						6
													0
													0
		1		2				2		1			6
													0
	1		2		2								5
1		3					2						6
2	3		1		1	1		1	1				10

(Original, edited by Dragon)

Game Review: Nishiki

Mahjong solitaire, while popular, can mostly be played through a computer; creating any layout by hand with actual tiles is way too much work. The other alternative is the flatter and wider playing cards, where there can be more flexibility with what categories are considered matching. While an intro of this kind is not a great way to start this review, it's hard not to meander like this if the game in question has a rather oriental flair in its inception: it was created with the use of Hanafuda cards in mind.

Open information solitaires are a common breed whether historical and invented. Old games of this kind has the goal of building up cards by suit on foundations, while for this specific review it deals with a mix of building and matching, with the goal of clearing the layout. With an English name of Brocade, it's hard not to weeb it up and christen it with the closest Japanese term: nishiki (錦). The game is played with Hanafuda cards in mind, but you can strip a rank from a deck of cards, and lay them out in a weave of alternating horizontal and vertical cards, as can be seen in this online player.

Play involves moving cards with at least one free short edge and placing them onto cards with any free side. A card can only be placed onto another card of the same season(rank by analogy) and the stack stays until all four cards of its season are placed onto it and is immediately removed as soon as possible. This means that there can only be one stack of a season at a time and for the game's purpose single cards are not stacks. Cards and stacks can only be moved and removed if it does not split the layout into islands. Removing all twelve stacks wins the game.

Nishiki uses an interesting removal mechanism, where immediate and delayed removals coexist and how a wrong removal means an immovable pillar that leaves the game hanging. The requirement for the layout to remain in one piece gives this game a strategic aspect: do I build this one now or wait? The question is a rather moot one; you must start a pile on the edge and plan for it not to become a roadblock.

An interesting concept that gives way to unique play and requires new approaches to foresight, Nishiki mixes an overt layout and playable card limits in a different way.