Penguin (solitaire)

Rules

The object of the game is to free up the fourth base (which is buried at the top left corner of the tableau) and build all the cards into four ascending suit sequences on the four bases, wrapping around from king to ace as necessary.

You can build on exposed cards of the tableau, matching suit and in descending sequence (again, wrapping around from ace to king as necessary). You can move a full sequence at once (some of these games require you to move each card individually). An empty column may only be filled with the card one rank lower than the bases.

Then you have a reserve hand of up to 7 cards (David calls this the "flipper"): you can put anything in and take anything out of this at any time. I've put it at the top, to the right of the bases.

Notes

Vectorized Playing Cards 3.2 https://totalnonsense.com/open-source-vector-playing-cards/ Copyright 2011,2021 – Chris Aguilar – conjurenation at gmail dot com Licensed under: LGPL 3.0 – https://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.html (these seem to be based on the United States Playing Card Company's designs from 1960-ish: look for US7 at https://www.wopc.co.uk/members/ken-lodge/united-states-playing-card-co, for instance. So I'm not convinced they're out of copyright for Chris to license his tracings under the LGPL? But they seem to get copied a lot, so... I'm going to use them for the moment...)

Game implemented by Josh Grams, February 2024: this is one of my favorite solitaire games. This is an early prototype that I'm posting to show a couple friends so it's currently just the .love file and you'll need Love2D to run it (version 11.x).

This game is an invention of David Parlett: I first encountered it in a used copy of his 1979 book Solitaire: Aces Up and 399 Other Card Games.

As David says, this is "a variation on Eight Off or Baker's Game. Most games of that type strike me as being either too easy or too hard. I think Penguin balances quite well. It should come out rather more often than not with careful play, but you must give each new layout very careful thought before taking the plunge."

I like that aspect of it. If you're really good I think it comes out nearly three out of four times. Some layouts will look hopeless, but I find that usually even if they *seem* too scrambled, they've actually started unscrambling themselves out the other side and you can find a run or two to build and free up space.

And almost every game has at least one pinch point where you need every single slot available, so you have to play a bunch of the game out in your head to find the way past: it's not usually too easy and boring (for me). It *would* probably be better with undo (which I haven't implemented yet), so you could explore in the game instead of doing it in your head. I'll get to that at some point.

For me, starting the bases at a random rank and having the sequence wrap around provides a bit more interest as well. But my cousin finds that more annoying than fun and always starts with the aces, so your mileage may vary.

Error: main.lua:339: bad argument #1 to 'unpack' (table expected, got nil)
stack traceback:
        [love "boot.lua"]:345: in function <[love "boot.lua"]:341>
        [C]: in function 'unpack'
        main.lua:339: in function <main.lua:327>
        [love "callbacks.lua"]:154: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
        [C]: in function 'xpcall'