From my experience I would be very surprised if all hands of four suit spider solitaire are winnable, you can sometimes get a very a poor initial layout and I don’t see how you could win them unless the cards in the stack are in a very favourable order. This site claims only about half are winnable:
http://www.solitaireinnovations.com/microsoftSolitaireGames.html
I did get three in row once without Undo, but that was plain dumb luck. Two in a row is rare enough.
I think there must be unwinnable games because of the initial layout. You can also get in sticky situations. I had a great game going once and with one deal left i had only four cards left. Guess what, you can’t get the last deal unless you have a card in every column.
That’s an interesting bug! I bet they never considered the case where all the last 9 cards are of the same suit. You should report it to save someone else - about 50 years from now.
I wouldn’t call it a bug. It’s inherent in the game. If I’d paid attention I would have realized I had bound myself up that way.
I’m currently 62 wins to 3965 losses, high score of 1160 (on my current phone, I can’t remember my stats from my old phone). Never won two in a row.
I never undo, ever.
I find the game (rather than the puzzle) perfect, despite the crazily low likelihood of “success.” I appreciate the idea of allowing infinite undo as a puzzle, but that’s not me.
My high score is just 1116. I make a lot of unneccesary moves just to consider the choices, and a lot of rearranging to consolidate suits. Maybe one day I’ll try to play for score, but I enjoy just trying to win. I don’t use Undo because if I start then I’ll end up trying every possible path through a game and each one will take hours or days.
To recap: I posted the notion that all games are potentially winnable above and some have had their doubts about this.
To be sure that never occurred to me either until this last run of more than 100 straight games. I was defeated at 28 in a row by what seemed to be an impossible-to-win game and again at 44 in a row the same way. But this time I got a monstrous deal at 59 in a row and was determined to reach 60 to beat it. When I did (after some 4,000 moves) I began to suspect that every game was winnable and this notion proved to be a great aid to winning in spite of further apparently impossible deals…and kept working. The trick to winning really difficult hands is to do something weird, like–as I wrote above–putting the 5 of clubs on the 6 of hearts instead of the (more obvious choice) of the 5 of hearts…or even not moving a card when you could!
I don’t know for sure that every game is winnable; I just suspect it.
To answer madsircool (who pointed out the apparent contradiction of restricting started games to say 3 in a sequence if all games are winnable, I did emphasize that the starting strategy was intended to reduce the frequency of almost impossible games. 4,000 moves is awfully tiring.
And as for those who shun the use of Undo: entirely understandable. It depends on how you get your jollies when playing. I find that the Advanced game presents quite enough challenges to make it fun (1,000 moves or more is quite common) even with Undo and I don’t enjoy the idea of being defeated by the pure chance of whether at each move, I turn over card A instead of card B. There’s just too much luck involved in that–although I think that strategy might be better at making the Intermediate level more challenging.
I think you’re underestimating the level of strategy there is in the “purist” version. It takes a lot more thinking/calculating than you describe. In fact, I’d say it takes more strategy than using undo, because you need to figure out which of the possible moves give you the best chances of progressing, rather than just trying them all, if necessary, backtracking if you get stuck.
It’s definitely possible to win games in the 4-suit version without using undo, but mindlessly moving cards onto like suits isn’t enough to win very many of them.
There’s definitely a superior strategy in the ‘never undo’ version of playing that will result in better results than just always moving cards onto like suits when possible. However, that win rate is still going to be crazy low, which can make the game frustrating.
I prefer to play with undo now, because it makes the game far richer. With undo you can plan multi-step strategies and complex off-suit moves. I’ve been playing like this for a few years, and have yet to run into a game that I couldn’t beat. I’ve had streaks measured in hundreds of winning games that only end when I do something stupid like accidentally press restart instead of undoing.
That said, I’m sure it’s possible to construct games that can’t be won if it’s a truly random shuffle. It’s just exceedingly unlikely. Probably more unlikely than getting a royal flush in poker considering the number of potential combinations and moves you’d have to cut off.
You can do all this without undo, too—in fact, you have to plan better, because if you miscalculate, it’s a big deal. Meanwhile, there’s a whole category of calculation—“which move is most likely to help me?”—that only applies if you play without undo.
If you think that playing with undo makes the game far richer, I submit that you haven’t sufficiently explored the game without it. After all, you say,
It sounds like you’ve pretty much solved the game with the use of undo. Doesn’t that mean you’ve plumbed its strategic depths? On the other hand, you imply that your win rate without it is “crazy low”, which suggests that there’s room to improve your strategy there. For what it’s worth, my win rate without using undo is around 40%, and I’m fairly sure that my play is not “optimal”.
I’m not sure how this approach (just moving cards onto like suits) entered the discussion. I certainly don’t use it and I doubt that anyone playing the game at this level does.
In fact I would suggest “undo” players and “nundo” players would arrive at the same* initial* strategies relatively quickly, although with different motivations. This isn’t rocket science: there are only a limited number of possible strategies. The nundo player wishes to increase his or her success percentage but the undo player doesn’t wish to waste any more of his life that he is already doing. So both would likely start each hand with the same moves for the same reasons. The play would be the same up until the point–at the end of the hand or perhaps earlier–where success is clearly not going to happen. At this point, the undo player simply retreats and begins to embark on new strategies to win the hand.
The nundo player is more limited in choices. S/he is obliged to embark on those strategies that produce the highest chance of winning. In a situation where the face-up cards include 2 nine of clubs–one on a stack of 3 cards, one on a stack of 4–a ten of clubs and a ten of spades, the nundo player must choose the one play (nine of clubs on the stack of 3 to ten of clubs) that has the highest probability of winning. The undo player will follow that strategy too, as I’ve said, until it is apparent that it isn’t going to work. He or she will then start undoing to find which assumption was wrong, if necessary trying each of the 4 other options (including not moving either nine) at the position above. And there are other strategies that an undo player must adopt that a nundo player cannot. For example, I often have to place a card or stack on a different spot knowing what card was going to follow on that spot when the next round is dealt. The nundo play never encounters that problem.
But all in all, I think that this discussion of ‘better’ method is all about as fruitful as a discussion among mothers about which baby is the cutest or whether Windows is better than Linux. Everyone is going to arrive at the conclusion that their own is the cutest/best/smartest for their own different reasons. Each of us is different and chooses according to our likes and dislikes. Comparisons may be tempting but ultimately they’re meaningless.
I don’t believe this is true. A “nundo” player has to consider which strategy produces the highest chance of winning, but an “undo” player has no reason to consider this: he can simply try all possibilities until he finds the best one.
You seem to be making an assumption: that an undo player enjoys wasting whole days trying one random, mindless move after another. Does that really make sense? Personally, I have all kinds of motive to find the quickest solution possible to any game; there’s no reason to assume that undo players are any less intelligent and competitive than a nundo player. The approach you suggest wouldn’t work. To just try one random move after would require at least that you keep track of which moves you’ve tried, and even then there is a lot of head-scratching to figure out what other moves are possible.
I strongly recommend to any nundo player making comments about the undo game, that at least you try it for 100 hands and then at least you’d be in a position to properly understand it.
The only difference between using undo and not using it is that once you make an irreversible move you’re stuck with it. That’s all. I don’t see any reason that players wouldn’t use the same strategy whether or not they use undo. As far as matching up suits, it’s usually the last consideration of a move. Given all other things being equal you place one suit on another. An exception would be maintaining suit in a long column where there are still cards to turn over in the stack for that column, but you’d have to be nearing the end of the game to determine that was worth doing.
Well, if you have multiple cards that can go on another, all of different suits, an undo player would be foolish to at least look what was under each, something the nundo player can’t. But besides that, I agree that the strategy is the same.
By the same token, the nundo player would be foolish not to invest thought in considering the relative likelihoods and expected values of each possibility, something the undo player has little need to do.
Just won my first game with zero undo’s on expert, played 170 games so far haven’t lost a single game but yeah four suits is very doable and the only way I play these days.
http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e236/stereomanuk/spidersolitaire_zpsidubfn1f.png~original