About Winnable Solitaire

I had gone searching for info on the 'net about any version of regular ol' Solitaire (Klondike to be specific) that was more winnable than the popular but rather luck-based Regular Solitaire. This search quickly led me to Eric Sink's Winnable Solitaire project. It was exactly what I was looking for.

But after playing a few trial games I still wasn't satisfied. Yes, in theory you could win all the deals, but it really wasn't easy to win many more games. I contacted Eric and found he'd more or less moved on from that little pet project, and after a brief negotiation he agreed to sell it to me for a chunk of change.

Once I had his solitaire solver in my hands, I started tweaking it and working on making Klondike a little easier while attempting not to sacrifice any of the real essence of the game. The result is the Winnable Solitaire you can play here today.

It combines Eric's guaranteed winnability with my scaled difficulty deals that I've used for many years on my Freecell.net site, and furthermore introduces the modified way of dealing the stock, so that as long as the stock is not a multiple of 3 cards you'll get a nicely cycled tour of all the available cards. Less getting stuck, more wins. I modified Eric's solver to be aware of this new mode of operation, and voila. Now, as with Freecell, the challenge becomes not just trying to win but also trying to see how many in a row you can win ("streaks" in Freecell parlance).

Welp, I hope you have half the fun playing this that I had putting it together. I'll be watching fer ya on those Top Streaks lists now.

— Denny (dennis.croningmail.com)