A while back I saw a video by Simone of the Polygon Youtube channel about playing cards. This piqued my interest, as a huge card game lover :). My love for card games started as a kid, playing Top Trumps decks on the playground, collecting some Pokémon cards and later playing classic card games during lunch. But also digitally card games got me hooked, there's a reason solitaire shipped on almost every pc and i'd rather not talk about the hours I spent playing Hearthstone as a teen. I've also spent countless hours playing rougelike cardgames like Slay the Spire or Balatro lately.
But after watching the video I got back into playing solitaire. As Simone says in the video, there's more permutations of a 52 card deck then there are atoms on Earth. The idea that when you solve a game of solitaire, you will most likely be the first person in history to have solved that exact layout of cards. After I learned that Zachtronics' solitaire collection was available for my phone, I immediately bought it. The game contains a collection of solitaire variants originally created for as mini-games for various Zachtronics puzzle games. Each one having some novel rules set ranging from minor tweaks to solitaire variants, to entire new decks (Shenzen Solitaire uses a three color deck inspired by mahjong tiles). I loved the way that a subtle rules change could create an entirely different puzzle with the same playing cards that have been around for ages, like Cluj solitaire's ability to cheat by locking a card in place until it can be placed correctly.
I thought that recreating one of the solitaire variants featured in the collection would be a great way to practice some game-design. So I set out to make a demake (remake/imagining of a game in a retro style) of Sawayama Solitaire from the Last Call BBS game. I wanted to do this in PICO-8 as I had been messing around with the platform in the past but hadn't managed to finish a project. So the result of that effort is below. It's not perfect, but it is definitely playable :)
Just play it! If you've ever played solitaire, you will probably catch on to the small rule changes quickly. Otherwise below is a little rules explanation.
Sawayama solitaire works as a tweak of the classic Klondike solitaire. The goal of the game is to stack all cards, by suit, in order of ace to king in the foundation piles on the left of the screen. You can do this by organizing the stacks of cards, cards can be in a stack of alternating color and descending value. Any correct stack of cards can be dragged onto an empty stack. In the top left you can find a deck of the remaining cards. Clicking on the deck, deals out the top three cards. Each of the dealt out cards (this is called the stock) is visible, you can hover over the covered cards to show them. After all the cards from the deck are dealt, there's no re-dealing the cards, instead the empty space where the deck was becomes a free space where one card can be stored. This also means that there's complete information about the cards once the deck has been dealt. The game is controled with your mouse, just click and drag the cards where you want them (touch controls on your phone work-ish but there kinda jank). Have fun!