CAGD 170 Solitaire Mod

I was part of Group 4. For this project, we were tasked with developing a mod for the card game solitaire. I used to play solitaire a lot as a kid, so I was already very familiar with the game.

My initial instinct was to think simple: come up with one or two major changes and make minor tweaks afterwards to match. To be honest, after a few minutes of rearranging the cards around, my partner and I came up with a core idea: instead of organizing and then collecting all the cards in the deck, the player instead had to unearth a smaller number of cards from a larger pile. This ended up being the twelve royal cards, giving the game a sort of "revolution" theme, trying to seek out the royalty attempting to hide among the populous.

To make the tableau a much bigger place for the royal cards to hide in, the stock pile was greatly reduced. For our first version, the tableau was 7x6 cards (because as a Hitchhiker's Guide fan, I can't resist the allure of 42), and so the stock pile only had 10. From there, it made more sense to just have it as a hand from which all cards can be used at any time.

Through playtesting this seemed to work quite well, and a few other rules followed just from playing around and seeing what would be most interesting. These rules were being able to play anything on a royal card, but losing it to the discard pile when the royal card is collected. The idea really just came about while playing, but in the first version of the game, there was no real need to use this. Any time the player might get stuck, it's easier to make the safe play of using a card from your hand to continue sorting the cards. It doesn't make sense to run the risk of building a pile on a royal card that you will eventually need to destroy when you collect the card.

So after playing version 1 a few times, my partner and I came to one main conclusion: it's too easy. The game probably sounds complicated hearing it, but if anything it's simplified compared to regular solitaire. Your goal is simpler and so are your tools.

So for version 2, we reduced the hand further and therefore increased the tableau. The hand now only has 6 cards. It can't be symmetrical anymore, but after some testing, we adjusted the cards in the tableau to be embrace the asymmetry found in the base game. This makes the short pile of only 5 an optimal starting place.

For a visual, here's the version 2 board design:

After another round of testing, this felt too difficult, so we proposed one last clever tweak: when dealing out the hand, aces get re-shuffled back into the deck. This way, every card in your hand might be useful to you. However, it's still pretty limited.

The added difficulty makes the player engage with its unique system. Players may oftentimes face a dilemma: should I collect this royal card now, or leave it in case it is needed to maneuver cards later? Should I stack cards on top of it and risk having them permanently discarded?

Because solitaire asks the player to sort every card, every card is needed. So discarding cards early greatly increase the likelihood of having to discard more cards in the same way later. This emergent system forces the player to have to choose the best way to use their resources: using them for complex plays, or using them to further the immediate goal.