Chapter 76

He thought about the nameless game of solitaire and considered its merits.  He’d already determined that it definitely took up the most room of any of the variants he knew.  And, while that was normally a negative factor, it was a positive one in this case.  He liked the idea that he could take up as much room as he wanted to.  In fact, he practically luxuriated in it.  The wide expanse of his bed was more than enough for him to play any variant that he might wish to play, twice over even.  He briefly considered that idea, but rejected it relatively quickly because it wouldn’t be practical for him to do so.  He would already be dividing his attention between playing his game of solitaire and watching his movie; he didn’t need to add any more distractions.  In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle any more distractions than he was already engaged in.

He then turned his thoughts back to the nameless variant.  The rules for it were straightforward enough that he shouldn’t have any problems in that area.  All he had to do was put the cards down and start moving them according to numerical order.  That shouldn’t be hard for him since he’d been able to count past thirteen from an early age and that had been a long time ago, in his reckoning.  And, considering he would only have four slots to choose from when it came to moving his cards, he wouldn’t have to worry about an overload of possible moves.  And that would also go toward making it a rather easy variant for him to play, even though he wasn’t feeling his best.

He tried to think of any significant negative reasons for playing this variant.  He thought there was a limit to the number of times he could pick up, shuffle, and replay the cards, but that shouldn’t be too hard to keep track of.  He could easily use the aces to count the number of times he ran through the deck by putting them in a different order for each time he went through the deck.  All in all, he couldn’t think of any major detractors for this variant, and he could for the other ones that he’d thought of, so he was pretty sure he would play the nameless variation.  He just had to set it up and then he’d be ready to go.

Chapter 75

He thought about accordion.  It was a simple enough game, and it could take up a lot of space, but it wasn’t guaranteed to do so.  And, because he was going to be playing on his bed, he thought it would be fun to take up a lot of space.  On the other hand, it was a game that was supposed to be played in a straight line, and he wasn’t sure if his bed would be big enough for him to actually play it in a single line.  And, while he knew it didn’t have to be played in a straight line, he thought it might be fun to play it that way for once.  Whenever he’d played it before he’d just started a second line, and third line and so on, when he’d run out of space at the right end of the deck as it was played.  But, this could sometimes cause him problems when he was trying to figure out which cards should be move and where they should be moved to.  But, he would still have to move the cards into place no matter which way he played it.  And, it really wasn’t that hard for him to keep track of which cards when where most of the time.

But, he wasn’t feeling completely well, so it wasn’t like it was most of the time.  His tiredness could become a problem if he tried to play accordion.  It would probably take more of his concentration than it normally would for him to keep the rules straight.  And, considering he was going to play some sort of solitaire game as a way to take a break, playing accordion might not be all that relaxing.  He would have to think about, not only the things he’d normally have to think about when playing it, but he would also have to concentrate harder on it than he thought he wanted to.  So, considering all that, he was pretty conflicted about whether or not he wanted to play accordion.  He still knew other variants of solitaire, so he wasn’t too concerned, but he would still have to consider their merits, too.  And, he also had the movie that he would be nominally watching to take into consideration, because he would probably want to stop and actually watch some of the scenes in it.  Then again, he didn’t really have to worry about being interrupted in  the middle of his play, because most of the variants he knew were easy to pick up in the middle and find one’s place.

Chapter 74

So many choices, he thought.  His default mode with Klondike was to have an infinite number of chances to go through the deck; although, practically speaking, one couldn’t really go through the deck an infinite number of times.  After a while the deck could get stuck.  And, even with certain alternate rules, that couldn’t always be fixed.   One of those variants, when he was dealing three cards at a time, was to slip the card at the end of the deck to the beginning, or to move the card from the top of the deck to the bottom of it.  Another alternate rule, was to put the end cards at the beginning if there weren’t three of them.  Of course, those choices led to the possibility of just going through the deck one card at a time; if he were going to make it so that he could play any card by shifting the deck, then he could more effectively accomplish that by just playing one card at a time in the first place.  But, playing one card at a time meant that it would take longer to get through the deck each time, and that could be annoying in its own right; so, he’d likely turn three at a time.

With all the variety of Klondike, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to play it or not.  With the whole point of playing some sort of solitaire card game being to not have to think very hard, considering Klondike didn’t really fit the bill, so to speak.  He would have too many choices if he decided to play it, and that was counterproductive.  Then again, he did have a certain familiarity with it because he mindlessly played in on his computer for hours on end sometimes.  And, even though he’d use significantly less stringent rules than the ones in his computer version, he would still have a certain amount of automation when it came to playing.  But, that same mindlessness went into playing perpetual motion; and, when he played that, he’d turn over four cards at a time.  Ironically, to speed up the process; his family sometimes teased him about it because the whole purpose of the game was to waste time, and he was trying to make it go faster.   And, because he played so much perpetual motion with an actual, physical deck of cards, whereas he usually played Klondike on his computer, he knew that it was incredibly likely that he’d turn four cards instead of three.

Chapter 73

He thought about some of the variants he could play.  One of them was accordion, in which he took the deck and played it a card at a time, from left to right.  If the card played was either the same rank or suit as the card to its immediate left or three cards to the left of it, then the righthand card was moved on top of the matching card; if there were any cards underneath the righthand card, then those cards were moved, too.  If it matched both the first and third card to the left, then he got to choose which one it went on top of.   As the game progressed, the piles of cards were consolidated together; the ultimate goal being to make one big pile.  The fact that there was no re-deal was a plus for him, because he wouldn’t have to think too hard about what he was doing if he played it.

Another variant he could play was one that he didn’t know the name of, but it took up a lot of space.  All the cards played in four rows of thirteen cards each.  The aces were then removed and he would move cards into those spaces.  He could move a card into any of the spaces, but the card moved had to be of the same suit, and had to be the next card up in rank of the card to its left; no cards could be placed after a king.  If one of the leftmost spaces was empty, then he could move any two into that space.  When all the kings were to the left of spaces and no more cards could be moved, he would pick up all the cards that weren’t in numerical order starting with a two in one of the four leftmost slots.  He would then incorporate the aces with the rest of the deck, shuffle it, and fill in the rows so that they had thirteen cards again; then he’d start the moving process again.  If he remembered correctly, he had three re-deals, but that would be easy to note by the way he picked up the aces, putting a different one on top depending on which deal it was.

Or, he could always fall back on the good old standby of Klondike.  When he was younger, his classmates used to call it seven-up; and, as a matter of fact, a lot of them probably still called it that.  But that was a misnomer; seven-up  was an entirely different variant, with its own set of rules.  But he could understand calling Klondike by the name seven-up, because there were seven cards face-up in Klondike.  The thing about playing Klondike was that he would then have to decide how many times to go through the deck and how many cards to deal.