Games on a Plane: The Definitive Review
Au Solitaire, mon amour!
The main reason for the apparent closure of Affectionate Discourse for nearly a month was due to me being on the other side of the world to where I usually live. We’d gone on a long-awaited trip to stay with relatives in New Zealand, which commands the delight of enduring a twelve-hour flight followed by a nine-hour one, as we’d opted to go via Singapore. Needless to say, the 90 minutes we spent at Changi airport were spent in a state of hallucinogenic stupor, thanks to the twin pleasures of having mere snatches of sleep (of the worst possible quality) and a spectacular shift in timezone. The fact that the season had also changed was barely noticeable, as I was lost in that otherworldly, atemporal space of the traversable Airport departure area. At Changi this is a cross between an 80s office and a 90s shopping mall, with rows of retail generica interspersed with the incredibly unwelcome gaudy intrusions of high-fashion brand outlets. And yet, somehow, there was a WH Smith; an almost unbelievable discovery that functioned more as some confounding mirage to disorient you even further, rather than a place to go and buy magazines and sweets. The opening of our connecting flight’s departure gate came as quite some relief. Suddenly feeling the urge to lie completely supine on the carpeted floor, I returned to the game that had assisted me through the previous half-day of aerial chair-sitting and would become a constant companion until we returned to Britain; Solitaire.
Of course, this is specifically Alexei Anoshenko's 250+ Solitaire Collection for Android, which I’d written professionally about over a decade ago. Back then, I’d been playing digital Solitaire for twenty years. Now that I can claim thirty, I’ve no shame in my toil. It remains supremely compelling without any modern adornments, and Balatro1 be damned, it’s always going to be the best mobile game I’ve ever played. Now, I had planned extraordinarily well for the flights. I’d brought my softmodded DSi, my RG-something retro handheld AND my PlayStation Vita, as well as my Polyend Tracker, all to accompany my laptop as a grandiose suite of devices to stave off in-flight boredom. Why then, did I not touch any of them? Can Solitaire really be so compulsive that it overrides all those ROMs and legit carts? I had Vita Disgaea 3 fully charged and ready to Item World for twelve hours straight, and had made some considerable progress with Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier on the DSi, specifically in preparation for this fucking flight.
The answer was desperately simple: my phone was nearer. But that’s not all! It was actually more to do with me being on a glorious run to beat my consecutive win record. In the decade since I wrote that piece for Eurogamer, I’ve come to sense a certain providence in the seed for any given run my 250+ Solitaire Collection, and armed with a faith that I could solve every round if I tried hard enough, this run felt like it was a good one. It was gut instinct, borne of thousands of rounds played. And I mean thousands of rounds in the obscure ruleset I’ve dedicated myself to. This is called Simple Raglan and is much more forgiving than the standard Klondike ruleset. In Simple Raglan, the entire deck, save seven cards and the aces, is dealt onto the columns face-up. The remaining seven sit at the top where the deck would sit in Klondike, with the aces forming the first cards in the suite stacks. This means you can see where every card is from the off. A big dose of latitude comes from being able to move any card into a cleared column. You can also place aces on twos, and then stack kings on the aces. Yes, this means you can have one single column that contains the entire deck if you want. This much more versatile way to play rewards strategic thinking and has its own, unique sense of decluttering as you set about reducing the entropy of the entire board. The amazing power of being able to move any card (or correctly-sequenced stack of cards) into an empty column shifts the focus of the game onto tidiness and what I call ‘movement’ - the incremental microsorting of cards into correct sequences of pairs or triplets before they can be shunted onto a big old chain or up to the suite collection stacks. You’re always doing little arrangements to keep moving towards lower entropy, as this invariably reaps rewards later in the game. A bit of free-of-charge tidying early on, which can be easily missed, can stop you from jamming up all your free columns and bringing the game to deadlock.2 And once again, the free, empty columns are the key to winning. The rightmost column gets just one card at game start, so sometimes this is the easiest place to get your first free column and be able to start lowering the entropy. But sometimes serendipity shines upon you and a chunkier column gets cleared, which is always delicious. I have a private theorem that if you can get two clear columns, then the round is solvable.3
The deep joy of Simple Raglan, which Klondike doesn’t have, is in plotting out sequences of moves, clearing columns and making leaps of progress. By seeing every card, you can work out a chain of movements and stackings that may start with you moving onto a free column, but ending with you clearing out a different column, so your net total of empty columns is restored. That idea of trying to keep at least one free column while keeping up the movement is the core loop of the game. When versed, you can be looking ahead five or six moves, which brings the play closer to a modern strategy RPG than you’d expect. It’s almost fighting game flowcharting in slowmo, especially when balancing the trade-off between bringing an ace down from the suites to clear a nasty king4 out of the way, or stacking up lower value cards onto the suite collections to make space. When faced with a deal that may have three of the same value locked into a single column, you know you have to chip away at it to free up those cards or the run is over. This is another case of feeling the vibe of the current RNG; sometimes it’ll deal you nasty clumps of lower-value cards behind the royals and you can almost taste the spite in it. And yet, faced with that misfortune, a seasoned player has a good chance of taking it on and winning.
It was in the easier wins that Simple Raglan got its hooks in me. Back in the Eurogamer piece, I remark that for trad Klondike, I’d never got beyond two successive wins. It still feels pitiful, but that’s 3-draw Klondike for you. On the flight to Singapore, the RNG vibe was good, and it looked like I had a shot of beating my Simple Raglan record of fifty four wins. Yes, fifty four. Perhaps now you can understand why I find Simple Raglan so compelling, especially when it can deal out a deck that’s immediately unsolvable. I have had that happen several times; the game does the deal and then announces there are no further moves that can be made. When you’re 30+ wins in, this is devastating and illustrates that where this ruleset offers a pleasing leniency, it also has its own barbs of cruel indifference to drop on you. I hope you can imagine the tension when getting closer and closer to your record, knowing the next deal could be insolvable before you’ve even moved a single card. As you ascend through the twenties and thirties, the run builds momentum and yet superstition takes hold and I end up with the sense that I’m tempting fate, pushing the RNG to spike me back. I swap to my other mobile obsession, Toon Blast, only to have it fuck me over with three levels designed to make you fail so frustratingly that you pay money to get past them. The glorious Magic Disco is lost, and I turn away, perhaps never to return. Thankfully Simple Raglan isn’t so mercenary and I pick up the challenge somewhere over Bangladesh, doling out a few more wins before I attempt to have some terrible-quality sleep. It was actually on the ground in New Zealand when I reached my fifty-fourth game and, thankfully, it was a really easy one. A straightforward clearance that pushed me out into a new wilderness. Oddly, starting the fifty-fifth game had no fanfare at all. 250+ Solitaire Collection parsimoniously records your consecutive wins on a minimalist stats page that’s displayed between games, but seeing the digits 55 there meant plenty to me. On reaching fifty six wins, I pondered if I should push to a nice, round number: sixty four (of course!). And thus, we had a target!
Simple Raglan ended my run a bit short of the magic number I wanted, grinding me to a halt at sixty wins. It was one of those deceptive deals that looks perfectly fine until you notice three of the twos are right at the very end of the longest columns and are locked behind royals. Cruelly, the single card column was occupied by a three of hearts. The two of hearts being one of those held far, far away. What I loved about this moment was the conflicting emotion; sad that the run was over, but glad that the stress was too. That pressure to keep going once you’ve breached a record can be utterly demotivating if you fear the inevitable failure that’s literally on your cards. While I’m happy to embrace that kind of oblivion, I can’t deny the anxiety its anticipation causes. Having your ‘current wins’ total reset to zero is cleansing, it’s a liberation of sorts. But then you get that staccato, donkey-petrol lurching of runs coming to abrupt halts in the single digits. This is where my superstitious faith in the RNG seed comes to the fore. The gods do not smile with the same grace as they did on that unbroken march to sixty wins, yet somewhere in the game you feel their latitudes as much as their caprices and press on regardless until the vibes come good. And press on I did. Currently I’m on six wins, a mere tenth of where we need to be. But I know if I keep playing, I’ll get to sixty-one. Eventually.
As for the grand voyage home, I had the return of an old friend to offset the Solitaire obsession. Our youngest got a Switch Lite, which meant my venerable old beast was returned to me. Having seen how I’d ignored my other devices on the way, I formulated a much better plan: fill my phone with podcasts and get stuck into Disgaea 5. You see, this was probably the reason why I didn’t get down to brass tacks with Disgaea 3. My Disgaea 5 save was much less advanced, so I had much more work to do. And sure enough, the combo proved to work brilliantly and whilst flying over central Asia, I was plumbing the item world depths like never before while listening to gay Australians dissecting Blake’s 7 with wonderful aplomb. And yet, as we finally reached that holding pattern over London while inbound to Heathrow, it was Simple Raglan that occupied closing hour of then flight. It just fills the spaces so much better than anything else.
There’s a fun poetry in my renewed Solitaire obsession as the rest of the world celebrates the greatness of Balatro, and of course this leads me to think of the obvious: could you Balatro the shit out of Simple Raglan? I’d guess yes, but then people have been gaming the shit of Klondike for decades now, to the point where it's just part of the mobile gaming bedrock. Perhaps Balatro’s triumph will inspire deeper exploration in rogueliking other rulesets for card games. Anyone up for hardcore Shithead? And perhaps Simple Raglan will remain a Solitaire obscurity, buried deep in the lists of hundreds of rulesets, its popularity waiting for some unlikely moment of serendipity. But hey, we can dream.
[21]
While I harbour considerable guilt over still not playing a single game of Balatro, I feel that I'm actually doing myself a favour in my abstinence. The degree of obsession from nearly everyone I've spoken to assures me that I'm probs better off avoiding it, as I followed the crowd with Vampire Survivors and had to give myself an intervention, drastically increase my drug intake and inflict considerable amounts of violence to free myself from its grip.
A key aspect of 250+ Solitaire Collection is that it allows you to restart a level without ending your winning streak. You get exactly the same shuffle and deal, but restarting is often the key to solving what appear to be intractable deals. It turns out that a lot of the time, these are actually only intractable because you fucked up at some stage, often an early one.
This feels much more confidently true for three clear columns, as that makes it easy to build sequenced stacks by having one as a construction space and two free to swap fragments from busier columns. This should be possible with two columns, and while I think I’ve always found it to be true, I won’t be submitting a paper to arXiv anytime soon.
In Simple Raglan, kings are column jammers because unless you deploy aces, you can't stack them on anything else and as they're the last card onto the suite collections, they're just obstacles. As such if I can avoid moving a king onto a free column, I will. Another thing to consider is that pulling down aces means having at least one two in play, which generally means having correctly stacked fragments of the lower-value cards too. In short, to get a couple of twos, you're probably going to need a couple of threes and fours in place as well - because you need the aces to be free to use them. If you’re lucky, you can split the strat by having a red and black suite for collection stacking and then deploy the remaining red and black aces to cope with errant kings, but generally speaking the deck is way too messy for that to actually happen and be useful.