Solitaire samsara

[gfish]

I've been a solitaire addict for a long time. I find it a nice way to let my mind drift. It's a good state for letting ideas come to me, much like taking shower. Just after moving to Vancouver, though, I found myself increasingly bored with standard (Klondike) solitaire. Emboldened by my grand new self-identity as a grad student, I decided to finally move up to the big leagues and learn Freecell. Which turned out to be awesome for the following reasons:

* It's much more mentally challenging
* Every game is winnable if you try hard enough
* There was a very nice app for my Windows Mobile device

After a few months, though, it started to feel too easy. The problem was that, if you move cards up into the four destination columns as soon as you can, the difficulty curve of each game is all wrong. It starts off hard, and gets easier and easier until you're done. (This was really driven home playing the default XP version of the game, where it would do this automatically, each move you make triggering larger and larger cascades until the game is suddenly and unsatisfying won out from under you.) So I did the natural thing, and started making it arbitrarily harder for myself. Namely, I started trying to avoid using the destination columns as much as possible. This saved a bunch of needless card shifting on the PDA anyway. Played this way, the game is much harder... but no longer guaranteed to be winnable. I started giving up on games much more frequently, which always felt a bit shameful in the back of my head. And eventually... I forgot that I had changed the rules. Freecell started to feel needlessly hard and unfun in my head, and I drifted away from it.

When I got my Android phone this summer, I found a new Freecall app... and remembered that the rules I had been playing with weren't actually the rules. Suddenly the game became a lot more fun again. (The effortless joy of playing with a modern multi-touch interface as compared to a stylus PDA with a flaky encoder helped a lot as well!) I played a lot over the summer... to the point that it started to seem too easy. Once again I made it harder on myself, and now I'm back to the point where putting anything higher than an ace up in the destination columns feels like cheating. It's an endless cycle. Maybe some day I will find the eightfold path to breaking free, but this is not that day.

ETA: Yes, I'm aware that there are unwinnable Freecell games. The chance of hitting one is vanishingly small.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Ya beat me to it. Also games -- if you choose "select number" -- 0 and -1, if I remember right.

But, yeah, freecell is a wonderful game and does a great job of requiring complicated, interlocking setups.