
But if you can get the entire deck down to just five cards or less, you can consider yourself to have accomplished a minor victory. While at first you'll make good progress, you'll quickly discover that it's extremely difficult to win, with success estimated to be around 1 in 50 at best. Thoughts: Accordion has a very different feel from the traditional building type of solitaire game, so it's a good game if you are looking to try something different from builder games. The aim of Accordion is to end up with the entire deck of cards in a single pile. If a card has the same suit or value as the card immediately to its left, or the same suit or value as the card three to its left, it can be placed on that card. If you wish, you can even deal the entire deck at the outset of the game. The name is very appropriate, since the gameplay has the sense of ironing out accordion pleats, and you'll be moving cards together much like an accordion is played, with the goal of compressing the entire deck into a single pile.Ĭards are dealt one at a time in a row, as many as space allows. Overview: Accordion is a classic solitaire game that you will find mentioned in most books that contain one-player card games.
PEG SOLITAIRE FORMULA SOFTWARE
I've used and recommend the excellent software from BVS Solitaire to play most of these. In this article I'll cover some of the best and more well-known ones.

The good news for those who like variety is that there are several non-builder solitaire card games that work entirely differently from the typical builder games you've probably played. Anyone who has ever played the classic Klondike will immediately recognize the style of game-play, and the above mentioned games are all excellent representatives of this genre.īut while builder games are the most popular archetype within the larger world of solitaire card games, there are many terrific solitaire games that don't operate at all according to this formula. While rules can vary, the usual pattern sees players permitted to arrange cards within this tableau in descending order, often in alternating colours. The way this usually works is by allowing players to manipulate cards within a tableau consisting of columns of cards. With builder games, the aim typically is to arrange all the cards by suit in ascending order from Ace through to King. But all of these games - and the many related ones that belong to their families - have one thing in common: they share the same basic formula for game-play, since they are all examples of builder games.īuilder games represent the largest slice of the solitaire pie, and are typically what the average person imagines a game of solitaire to be. Consider yourself more experienced with solitaire than most if you've ever played games like Baker's Dozen, Beleaguered Castle, Canfield, Fan Games, Yukon, or Forty Thieves. STAN-CS-91-1350.Despite the fact that the world of solitaire card games features a rich diversity of different types of games, most people are only familiar with the classic Klondike, and similar games of its kind like Spider, and FreeCell. A Programming and Problem Solving Seminar, Stanford University, Computer Science Department Technical Report No. Generalized Hi-Q is NP-complete, Trans IEICE 73.Į. Linear Cellular Automata and the Garden-of-Eden, Mathematical Intelligencer Vol. Mathematical Theory of Computation, McGraw-Hill book company. DNA Computing, Matching Systems and Universality, Turku Center for Computer Science, TUCS Technical Report No. Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation, Addison-Wesley Inc., Reading, Mass. Gardner, Peg Solitaire, in Unexpected Hanging and other Mathematical Diversions, Simon and Schuster, New York. Prefix Grammars: An alternative characterization of regular languages, Information Processing Letters. on Structure in Complexity Theory, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1992.


String Rewriting Systems Springer-Verlag Graduate Texts in Computer Science. Ins and Outs of Peg Solitaire, Oxford University Press, Recreations in Mathematics Series. Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays: Vol.

Solitaire Cones, Technical Report, School of Computer Science, McGill University.Į.
