Nobody could call me a true gamer. I don’t participate in role-playing, I only use one computer and one monitor, and I don’t dwell in a dank basement in a Command Center corner festooned with gizmos and discarded food containers. However, I do have a collection of games I play, and they’re frustrating enough at times to make up for my lack of skill in cube building or creature slaying.
I play Solitaire. Five different versions. The classic version is referred to as Klondike; it includes seven piles of graduated stacks of cards from one card to seven, with the top card upturned on each stack, and one must play the aces and grow each stack from the pile of playable remaining cards to the top of the stack ending with Kings. The other versions include Spider, which requires you to play cards from King to ace to remove them from the board until it’s empty; FreeCell, which allows the player to displace cards while building a Klondike stack by suit; Pyramid, which eliminates cards by playing any two which add up to 13 (Kings are discards, Queens are 12, Jacks are 11); and TriPeaks, which allows you to play a sequence of cards in order, switching directions when needed, to eliminate them from the board.
Sounds easy until you are challenged to play one particular card, or grow a stack to a certain number of one card. The levels of play are challenging from Easy to Expert, and daily challenges enable players to compete with others for time and completion. I have made second place a few times, out of hundreds of thousands of players. Sometimes I only manage to make the top twenty, if I’m lucky.
For those who get stuck, social media offers cheat videos from expert players who apparently make a living demonstrating how to win a difficult round. A few times a week I may find myself watching Marcella, who seems adept at figuring out how to shift cards around to do her bidding.
My normal method of game play is not to read the goal. I find that the temptation is to focus on that (“eliminate the six of clubs; okay, where is the six and how do I get to it?) and not calculate how to actually play, which wastes time. Instead, I play the game as intended, and when I reach the goal the game stops automatically.
This time, it didn’t work.
I came across an expert level puzzle–the last one for the daily challenges–in which I fruitlessly attempted to play FreeCell by digging out the aces and trying to work my stacks. It was proving to be a disaster. None of the cards appeared to be in a workable order. I tried for twenty minutes, then went to my online advisor Marcella, who solved the puzzle in about twenty seconds. In not reading the goal, I missed the fact that there was only one card needed, and it was about ten cards away from being revealed.
So I really was playing against myself, and was my own worst enemy. Expert level, indeed. More like expert distraction. The only way it was a hard puzzle was that I made it harder by not reading the goal.
The question now becomes whether I remain oriented to playing, or to solving what is called for. Either way, the clock ticks, and making the top ten doesn’t allow time for scrutinizing.
In a way, Solitaire represents life itself in that respect. But it’s less frustrating than chess, which I have yet to master, because the people I encounter who know how to play are not up to teaching.
I don’t think Marcella is into chess moves. But she’s a mean Solitaire solver.
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