Spider solitaire game
Roger
seemed a little too difficult to win with its 44 face down cards. Of
course the game would be easier with fewer face down cards. If Spider
was played with 40 or 42 face down cards would it be too easy to win?
Can anyone suggest a version of Spider that makes it easier to win and
still a sporting proposition?
Don Woods
I'll suggest instead that the problem is with your perception that the
game is too difficult to win. Sometime in the early 90s I got a letter
from someone (who had encountered the X-windows implementation, which
was based on a version I'd written for a different system) who said he
felt Spider was an inferior game because a skillful Spider player could
win only 10% of the games. That didn't match my own perception, so I
was moved to keep track of my win rate on my next 10 games.
My going in feeling was that I could easily win 10%, and usually more
like 1/3, and if I actually thought hard about my decisions I'd usually
win over half. I usually try to make the game a bit harder by trying to
remove as few completed suits as possible until the very end (with the
best possible victory being all eight suits completed but none actually
removed from the tableau). In the 10 games I recorded, I won 6 of them,
including two where I never removed any suits until the end. The other
four ranged between removing one to three suits before winning.
Taking advantage of the computer implementation, I then tried replaying
the four failed games, making slightly different decisions along the way.
I found that I could have won two of them if I had played differently.
This isn't a matter of prescient knowledge of the cards; it's just a
question of what to move into a space, which sequences to "naturalise"
(e.g. if I have two 7s of hearts, which should receive my single 6 of
hearts and which should have some other 6? which is more important to
keep mobile?), etc. Making these decisions one way or the other is to
some degree a matter of luck, but it's also possible that there are
reasons why my original decisions were inferior, and I simply hadn't
mastered the game enough to see why!
That said, one way to make the game slightly easier to win -- in theory --
would be to allow peeking at all the facedown cards whenever you want.
My father would occasionally play that way by dealing all of the initial
cards face up. If two or more cards that "should" be face down formed a
sequence, he would turn all but the lowest numbered card face down so he
couldn't move them as a unit until he had "uncovered" them, but he'd
still know all the cards because any facedown card was known to be one
higher than the card covering it. Frankly, I always found it HARDER to
play that way because all of the extra information was a distraction,
but strictly speaking it has to be easier to win!
-- Don.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-- Don Woods (don...@iCynic.com) Note: If you reply by mail, I'll get to
-- http://www.iCynic.com/~don it sooner if you remove the "hyphen n s"
John McLeod
Autumn Leaves is a game that is slightly similar, still somewhat
challenging, but seems considerably easier to win:
http://www.pagat.com/invented/autumn_leaves.html
--
John McLeod For information on card games visit
jo...@pagat.com http://www.pagat.com/
Roger
> -- Don Woods (don...@iCynic.com) Note: If you reply by mail, I'll get to
I would certainly be content with a close to 50% win rate for Spider.
But you have not yet convinced me that such a win rate is possible. I
consider a sample of 10 games too small to use to make any judgements
about win rate. I have also been able to win more than half the games
out of a set of ten. What is your win rate after playing 30 games?
VINCENZOL...@is234.org
fram...@ma.sdf.org
> On Friday, June 13, 2008 3:35:48 PM UTC-4, Roger wrote:
>> The traditional Spider solitaire game with four suits has always
>> seemed a little too difficult to win with its 44 face down cards. Of
started playing more solitaire, I've never lost a game of Spider with
44 facedown cards. I started playing a couple times a week (not always
Spider, usually 40 Thieves) maybe 3 months ago and I can't remember ever
losing a game of spider.
Now, 40 Thieves, on the other hand, I can count on one hand the number of
times I've won _that_.
captain...@gmail.com
Roger
> I have yet to find a game I cannot solve. Please forward me any you cannot do. Remember some games require a bad move strategy - ie to not complete good links in order to let the next laid row have a chance of being moved.
I am assuming that you play Spider with 4 suits, 10 columns, and an initial layout of 44 cards with only the top cards face up. How can a game be forwarded to you? Do you require a game number from a particular software package? Or do you need the rank and suit of each card in the initial layout and the rank and suit of each card in yet to be dealt?
Sincerely yours,
Roger
Roger
When I started this discussion some years ago by lamenting that 4 suit Spider solitaire was too difficult a game to win, I was referring to the situation where the player makes only one attempt to win the game with an occasional undo of a move during the one attempt. Moves that caused face down cards to be seen face up were not allowed to be undone. The webpage at http://www.bvssolitaire.com/stat/Spider.htm shows that of 122 Spider solitaire players 87% had win rates of 25% or less. The 100% win rates on this webpage are in my opinion bogus. I am not interested in what percent of the 4 suit Spider games can be won by trying every possible combination of moves.
Lately I have been playing the solitaire game Lady of the Manor. The game is supposed to require little or no skill, but I have found that deciding which tableau cards to build on the foundations requires some careful consideration. Does anyone have any strategy suggestions for Lady of the Manor?
Michael Urban
that cannot be solved (bury all queens on the bottom, put all
kings and two jacks as the top row; none of those cards will ever
move). Having played far too many games over the years, I estimate
that less than 1% of deals are insoluble, however; and fewer than
10% of games require removal of a completed suit for solution.
