Uneven Solitaire sometimes starts out locked, with the top of all piles isolated same-parity cards.
The first dozen moves are maybe a little tricky. But once you find an opening, it seems fairly easy if you focus on combining same-rank cards together. Just be careful to avoid having all piles locked with same parity. And you can split a same-rank group if you need more of that parity. (Maybe it should be 2-stars instead of 3)
(When I first started playing, I focused on groups of same-suit cards, but that's much less useful than groups of same-rank cards. It seems easy to win without using same-suit groups, except maybe a few moves at start.)
Swap-A-Taire seems pretty hard to lose. I failed to lose several times until I figured out I should deliberately avoid freeing an Ace, and then lock all the piles with 2-6 of the same suit, with 2, 3, and 4 on numbers larger than 5 (which is easier if you eagerly stack the other suits on the foundation).
Maybe its difficulty rating should be lower than 3 stars? It's not quite 1-star, because playing mindlessly will often get stuck in a loop, and it takes a little thought to get out of the loop.
Chaotic Solitaire is pretty tedious. So far, it's almost always just moving single cards to dig down to the next card that can be moved to the foundation, and the process usually buries the next card after that, so it's vaguely quadratic-ish time to solve.
I also get stuck maybe 50% of the time: all piles have the same suit, and nothing can be moved. I think I could be more careful to avoid that, but it's hard to stay focused when most of the time I'm just repetitively moving single cards to wait for it to randomly swap with a blocking King (or whatever).
The chaotic-ness is kinda interesting, and I think it's mostly the problem of blocking cards that makes it not so fun.
I think I'd like a variant that lets you stack ascending rank of same suit (as well as descending rank of alternating suit). That should make it a little easier to win, but also maintain the mood of struggling against chaos
Hi Hempuli, thanks for an amazing game. I believe I have discovered a bug.
In garden solitaire, place two blueberries of the same value into the top left and top right corner (might not be dependant on placement). Now place a blueberry in the middle that creates an average of 4 with one of the cards (so if you place two 3's in the corners, put a 5 in the middle for a 3 + 5 = 8, not a 6 for a 3 + 3 + 6 = 12). All three cards get collected, rendering some puzzles unsolvable.
Great game, but I'm begging you, PLEASE add an undo button, even if it's just for one move. It's painful realizing you've made a massive mistake immediately after placing a card (and in some modes, immediately after picking up a card).
Council of Secrets was fairly easy once I understood the rules. I settled on a strategy of ignoring the secret cards until I've arranged the main cards into 4 stacks of 2 suits each, ranks 4-10. Then, it's easy to identify the secret Jacks, then each suit's Queen and King.
The game would be trickier if it always auto-stacked, requiring you to continually work on deducing the secret cards. I think I'd have to get out pen and paper for that.
With tap solitaire is it intentional to be unable to move a tapped card to another pile if it has no cards above it? It feels a bit odd to have the tapped card become "glued" to that slot until it is untapped after being able to initially tap onto any slot.
Yeah, it's intentional; I think it makes sense that it's been "assigned" to that given slot and can only move by first becoming untapped and thus un"assigned".
Lock Solitaire has me hesitant to autostack, the first time I did while ever card was stacked in what I could've sworn was a clean order it trapped me with a one 13 of a locked suit. Which I imagine is something to do with the ordering of the stack, but it was admittedly a kind of sour way to lose that attempt and essentially makes me consider the button a death sentence. I don't know that there's necessarily a fix, rather just wanted to note that the button is kind of a bad time in that mode.
Still a fun mode though, also done 10 wins on Tap and Eldritch, Eldritch got a little weird because I found it easier to yolo the matches and occasionally I just get stuck with like a 12 and no appropriate matching cards. But that's to be expected of such a playstyle tbh.
I had the same experience, but a weird thing happened where I beat it legit without autostack and it still looked like I was going to be forced to fail because every usable card gets locked out, but then it seemed like the locks were automatically removed once we were down to the last card. So it's possible the game is supposed to be lenient on you at the end there and autostack locking you out is a bug? Hard to say.
Is Garden Solitaire technically possible to win? There are only two eggplant 4 cards in the deck, but because you need a 4 card to make a group of three cards average out to a sum of 4, that means I can only make two eggplant harvests per game, and I always end up with six eggplant cards that I just can't harvest. Am I missing something probably stupidly obvious, or is this just not mathematically possible?
Really enjoying this! But have found myself wishing for a control to "peek" at cards behind, since mouseover behavior seems inconsistent (e.g. to look at prior answers in the wordle solitaire).
Also wish that werewolf solitaire allowed for partial guesses while deducing (e.g. if you've narrowed down that it's a club but not sure if it's queen or king).
Will post other things as I encounter them, but this is awesome work, you really should post this to steam!
Megataire seems easier than 3 stars. I've played it 5 times and won every time. There's a lot of freedom from being able to stack the same rank together. It's a little tedious to move those cards one at a time, but it generally seems fairly easy to empty a column, and then use the empty column to consolidate stacks with Hanoi-like or Spider-like maneuvers.
I have an issue I'd love to figure out how to fix. I set the game's zoom to 2x to be easier for me to see, but when I closed the game and went back in, the window was its original size while the game was still zoomed in, meaning I can't do anything
Ah, that's annoying. For now, you can reset the setting by going to users/<your username>/AppData/roaming/ASM/ and deleting settings.txt there. Could you see if the same issue happens every time and report back?
In 52 Card Solitaire, sometimes the card I pick up will be at a lower layer than a card I just put down. I can get this to happen fairly reliably if I pick up a card, right-click to send it back, and pick up another card quickly. The card I'm holding now will slide under the card that was sent back. This sometimes also happens when stacking cards, not just send-back.
52 seems to have a very low win rate. More than half of the time, I get into a situation where there's no room to move off a card that's blocking everything else. And I'm pretty sure there isn't something I could have done differently; there's very little freedom in most of the random deals.
Is the 2-star rating supposed to be "how easy it is to play" or "how easy it is to win"? I think 52 is easy to play, but hard to win.
Love to have more solitaires to add to the well-worn Zachtronics collection! There are some excellent ones here, and being able to set a seed so you can keep working at the same puzzle is extremely appreciated—I've always wanted the Zachtronics collection to have that and I'm glad it's here.
One thing that'd be really nice is if the game state could be maintained when exiting to the main menu, so when you go back to that particular game again it'll be right where you left off. It's way too easy to accidentally close out of a game and lose all your progress, with how the button to exit the help screen is right on the same location as the exit game button, or how pressing ESC exits immediately with no confirmation, or how you can only access the options from the main menu. Toggle Mute and Toggle Fullscreen hotkeys would also be nice, if possible.
Also, I'm not really sure what's causing this, but Garden Solitaire gets in a weird state where it won't accept valid arrangements, especially with blueberries and eggplants. It's not like this right at launch, but something eventually gets it into this state. I will say that my RAM is very screwy at the moment so it might just be my machine. This is on seed 1712708836
Another bug report, the game is crashing when trying to open Eldritch Invasion now. Using seed 1
Error
stack overflow
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
[C]: in function 'newQuad'
spritesystem.lua:492: in function 'setup'
spritesystem.lua:125: in function 'change'
modules/eldritch_data.lua:67: in function 'cleanup'
main.lua:63: in function 'startgame'
modules/eldritch_data.lua:61: in function 'setup'
main.lua:87: in function 'startgame'
modules/eldritch_data.lua:61: in function 'setup'
main.lua:87: in function 'startgame'
...
main.lua:87: in function 'startgame'
modules/eldritch_data.lua:61: in function 'setup'
main.lua:87: in function 'startgame'
menu.lua:151: in function <menu.lua:141>
menusystem.lua:364: in function 'click'
menusystem.lua:340: in function 'clickcheck'
inputsystem.lua:149: in function <inputsystem.lua:146>
[love "callbacks.lua"]:154: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
So I'm trying to tackle an easier game, Time Travel, and I'm not sure how to "return" a card? The card is available and not covered yet it'll not get returned automatically, and I can't put it back where I got it from. What's the trick here? Loving the tunes and the idea here. Can't wait to explore more.
You can only return a card when it's at 1 time remaining, when the clock is red. If you aren't able to access that card when at 1 time, you can actually click a different time travel slot and it will always give you the same card, letting you essentially refresh all your timers indefinitely as long as you have one free time travel slot. It's a bit odd how most of these rules aren't stated - I didn't like the game much until I found out about the timer refreshing trick, and then it actually became one of my favorites.
It's one of the games that could most use some tightening up and clarification I think. The time traveled card always has an available placement, but quite a few times it gives me a useless card that forces me to stall by moving a card back and forth until the timers count down and I can try for a more useful card.
Thanks for the information I had this same issue. The rule explanations are a bit deficient in this game where it mentions you must 'return' a card but doesn't explain how or when.
Not sure I understand the rules for fork solitaire -- I am on the updated patch w/ the new rules explanation, but I often cannot create forks. I understand that I cannot create a fork ABOVE another fork, but there are many cases where I cannot create a fork below another fork too? Is there some branch limit or other unstated rule?
Here's a hastily put-together example of what I mean:
Ah, shoot; that's actually a detail not mentioned, I think - a card can't fork if it's already on a pile that has forked twice. There were a lot of these little rules mishaps in the game on release, I need to address these soon. Apologies.
i have noticed some of the terminology feels inconsistent between games and some is kind of ambiguous (e.g. i've gotten confused whether "below" means lower on the screen, or stacked underneath another card).
regardless i'm really enjoying the pack even though many of the variants feel slightly out of reach for me in terms of difficulty. i keep poking away at it even when i'm getting trounced. i think the aesthetic coherence and excellent music are a big part of it!
and maybe not intentional, but these rule quibbles do play into the "mystery" theme somewhat. it's been enjoyable to read between the lines in some of the games and discover that, oh, i can use monster attack slots as free cells, etc. i think most board game manuals would call these implied rules out explicitly, but i do think there is a case to be made for not spelling out too much. it gives it a unique feel, and it's sort of up to you whether you want to intentionally lean into that or not.
There's unfortunately no way to change how the screen behaves on my end. I've tried messing with the values in the lua files, but I have no idea what I'm doing and it doesn't seem to have any effect..
I'm able to workaround the scaling problem by changing line 9 in gamesystem.lua from "scaling = GAME.scaling or 1" to "scaling = 1". However, during game play, I cannot release a card after picking one up. Looks like touch events are not correctly handled.
I’d like to buy the game, but I’d prefer to wait to buy it on Steam, unless you plan to give a key to everyone who already paid for it here. I’ve only seen a little bit of gameplay, and it looks like a fantastic game!
Thanks! I don't think you can easily set up a "give a key to people who bought it elsewhere" system on Steam so holding off for now is probably your best bet.
If you’d like to, you can set it up on itch.io so that everyone that pays for the game gets access to a Steam key. From what I understand, this also allows anyone who has previously paid for the game to claim a Steam key.
As much as I love Balatro and reasonably enjoy regular Solitaire, I haven't magically inherited nearly enough card game skill to get through a single one of these haha (except the poker one, of course)
Still, I'll keep trying... and the tunes are nice!
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Comments
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Uneven Solitaire sometimes starts out locked, with the top of all piles isolated same-parity cards.
The first dozen moves are maybe a little tricky. But once you find an opening, it seems fairly easy if you focus on combining same-rank cards together. Just be careful to avoid having all piles locked with same parity. And you can split a same-rank group if you need more of that parity. (Maybe it should be 2-stars instead of 3)
(When I first started playing, I focused on groups of same-suit cards, but that's much less useful than groups of same-rank cards. It seems easy to win without using same-suit groups, except maybe a few moves at start.)
Swap-A-Taire seems pretty hard to lose. I failed to lose several times until I figured out I should deliberately avoid freeing an Ace, and then lock all the piles with 2-6 of the same suit, with 2, 3, and 4 on numbers larger than 5 (which is easier if you eagerly stack the other suits on the foundation).
Maybe its difficulty rating should be lower than 3 stars? It's not quite 1-star, because playing mindlessly will often get stuck in a loop, and it takes a little thought to get out of the loop.
Fair point! I think I'm ok with it being quite easy, so I'll adjust the star rating instead of changing the rules. Thank you!
Chaotic Solitaire is pretty tedious. So far, it's almost always just moving single cards to dig down to the next card that can be moved to the foundation, and the process usually buries the next card after that, so it's vaguely quadratic-ish time to solve.
I also get stuck maybe 50% of the time: all piles have the same suit, and nothing can be moved. I think I could be more careful to avoid that, but it's hard to stay focused when most of the time I'm just repetitively moving single cards to wait for it to randomly swap with a blocking King (or whatever).
The chaotic-ness is kinda interesting, and I think it's mostly the problem of blocking cards that makes it not so fun.
I think I'd like a variant that lets you stack ascending rank of same suit (as well as descending rank of alternating suit). That should make it a little easier to win, but also maintain the mood of struggling against chaos
I downloaded and ran this game but for some reason it won't start!
I am running windows 11 64bit
love 2D does not start either!
I'm posting a translated version of the game, so there might be some mistakes.
I'm sorry.
このゲームをダウンロードして実行したのですが何故か起動しません
windows11 64bit です
love 2D も起動しません
翻訳した文章を投稿してるので変なところがあるかもしれませ
ん
Do you get an empty window, or does the game not start at all?
game not start at all
I chose to allow it in the properties to trust or not, and it started up.
Sorry.
プロパティで信用するかどうかで許可を選択したら起動しました
すいません
Glad the issue was solved! :)
Hi Hempuli, thanks for an amazing game. I believe I have discovered a bug.
In garden solitaire, place two blueberries of the same value into the top left and top right corner (might not be dependant on placement). Now place a blueberry in the middle that creates an average of 4 with one of the cards (so if you place two 3's in the corners, put a 5 in the middle for a 3 + 5 = 8, not a 6 for a 3 + 3 + 6 = 12). All three cards get collected, rendering some puzzles unsolvable.
Is this intended behaviour?
Something similar happens with pumpkins. Place 2 and 6 at top, 1 and 7 at bottom, then 4 and 4 in the middle. All 6 pumpkins disappear.
Please for mac...
You can run it on macOS by doing this:
- Purchase and download the Windows version of A Solitaire Mystery
- Download LÖVE for free from here: https://love2d.org/
- Right-click love.app and choose "Open" (only needed the 1st time)
- Quit LÖVE (only needed the 1st time)
- Drag ASM.exe onto the love.app icon
It seems unintuitive, but this works because LÖVE will find the compressed game within the ASM.exe and run it with the macOS LÖVE runtime.
Enjoy :)
Great game, but I'm begging you, PLEASE add an undo button, even if it's just for one move. It's painful realizing you've made a massive mistake immediately after placing a card (and in some modes, immediately after picking up a card).
Council of Secrets was fairly easy once I understood the rules. I settled on a strategy of ignoring the secret cards until I've arranged the main cards into 4 stacks of 2 suits each, ranks 4-10. Then, it's easy to identify the secret Jacks, then each suit's Queen and King.
The game would be trickier if it always auto-stacked, requiring you to continually work on deducing the secret cards. I think I'd have to get out pen and paper for that.
Oh absolutely, I would enjoy that buff.
With tap solitaire is it intentional to be unable to move a tapped card to another pile if it has no cards above it? It feels a bit odd to have the tapped card become "glued" to that slot until it is untapped after being able to initially tap onto any slot.
Yeah, it's intentional; I think it makes sense that it's been "assigned" to that given slot and can only move by first becoming untapped and thus un"assigned".
Any chance getting a Steam version? Thank you.
There seems to be interest for that so possibly; I'll want to patch out a bunch of the bugs and such first though.
Thank you for your answer! Cheers!
Would love to see a Steam release of this as well!
Hanoi solitaire can always be won using only 5 slots and moving just same-suit stacks:
Ah, thanks! I think I had a hunch that it's always beatable but it's good to have confirmation.
Lock Solitaire has me hesitant to autostack, the first time I did while ever card was stacked in what I could've sworn was a clean order it trapped me with a one 13 of a locked suit. Which I imagine is something to do with the ordering of the stack, but it was admittedly a kind of sour way to lose that attempt and essentially makes me consider the button a death sentence. I don't know that there's necessarily a fix, rather just wanted to note that the button is kind of a bad time in that mode.
Still a fun mode though, also done 10 wins on Tap and Eldritch, Eldritch got a little weird because I found it easier to yolo the matches and occasionally I just get stuck with like a 12 and no appropriate matching cards. But that's to be expected of such a playstyle tbh.
I had the same experience, but a weird thing happened where I beat it legit without autostack and it still looked like I was going to be forced to fail because every usable card gets locked out, but then it seemed like the locks were automatically removed once we were down to the last card. So it's possible the game is supposed to be lenient on you at the end there and autostack locking you out is a bug? Hard to say.
Hmm. I need to investigate, thank you!
Is Garden Solitaire technically possible to win? There are only two eggplant 4 cards in the deck, but because you need a 4 card to make a group of three cards average out to a sum of 4, that means I can only make two eggplant harvests per game, and I always end up with six eggplant cards that I just can't harvest. Am I missing something probably stupidly obvious, or is this just not mathematically possible?
"You need a 4 card to make a group of three cards average out to 4" is plainly incorrect. 1+5+6=12, 2+3+7=12, 2+5+5=12, 3+3+6=12.
Really enjoying this! But have found myself wishing for a control to "peek" at cards behind, since mouseover behavior seems inconsistent (e.g. to look at prior answers in the wordle solitaire).
Also wish that werewolf solitaire allowed for partial guesses while deducing (e.g. if you've narrowed down that it's a club but not sure if it's queen or king).
Will post other things as I encounter them, but this is awesome work, you really should post this to steam!
Megataire seems easier than 3 stars. I've played it 5 times and won every time. There's a lot of freedom from being able to stack the same rank together. It's a little tedious to move those cards one at a time, but it generally seems fairly easy to empty a column, and then use the empty column to consolidate stacks with Hanoi-like or Spider-like maneuvers.
ye megataire's super easy (comparatively) lol
I have an issue I'd love to figure out how to fix. I set the game's zoom to 2x to be easier for me to see, but when I closed the game and went back in, the window was its original size while the game was still zoomed in, meaning I can't do anything
Ah, that's annoying. For now, you can reset the setting by going to users/<your username>/AppData/roaming/ASM/ and deleting settings.txt there. Could you see if the same issue happens every time and report back?
In 52 Card Solitaire, sometimes the card I pick up will be at a lower layer than a card I just put down. I can get this to happen fairly reliably if I pick up a card, right-click to send it back, and pick up another card quickly. The card I'm holding now will slide under the card that was sent back. This sometimes also happens when stacking cards, not just send-back.
52 seems to have a very low win rate. More than half of the time, I get into a situation where there's no room to move off a card that's blocking everything else. And I'm pretty sure there isn't something I could have done differently; there's very little freedom in most of the random deals.
Is the 2-star rating supposed to be "how easy it is to play" or "how easy it is to win"? I think 52 is easy to play, but hard to win.
Love to have more solitaires to add to the well-worn Zachtronics collection! There are some excellent ones here, and being able to set a seed so you can keep working at the same puzzle is extremely appreciated—I've always wanted the Zachtronics collection to have that and I'm glad it's here.
One thing that'd be really nice is if the game state could be maintained when exiting to the main menu, so when you go back to that particular game again it'll be right where you left off. It's way too easy to accidentally close out of a game and lose all your progress, with how the button to exit the help screen is right on the same location as the exit game button, or how pressing ESC exits immediately with no confirmation, or how you can only access the options from the main menu. Toggle Mute and Toggle Fullscreen hotkeys would also be nice, if possible.
Also, I'm not really sure what's causing this, but Garden Solitaire gets in a weird state where it won't accept valid arrangements, especially with blueberries and eggplants. It's not like this right at launch, but something eventually gets it into this state. I will say that my RAM is very screwy at the moment so it might just be my machine. This is on seed 1712708836
Another bug report, the game is crashing when trying to open Eldritch Invasion now. Using seed 1
Thanks!
So I'm trying to tackle an easier game, Time Travel, and I'm not sure how to "return" a card? The card is available and not covered yet it'll not get returned automatically, and I can't put it back where I got it from. What's the trick here? Loving the tunes and the idea here. Can't wait to explore more.
You can only return a card when it's at 1 time remaining, when the clock is red. If you aren't able to access that card when at 1 time, you can actually click a different time travel slot and it will always give you the same card, letting you essentially refresh all your timers indefinitely as long as you have one free time travel slot. It's a bit odd how most of these rules aren't stated - I didn't like the game much until I found out about the timer refreshing trick, and then it actually became one of my favorites.
It's one of the games that could most use some tightening up and clarification I think. The time traveled card always has an available placement, but quite a few times it gives me a useless card that forces me to stall by moving a card back and forth until the timers count down and I can try for a more useful card.
Thank you for the info! That's going to help a ton.
Thanks for the information I had this same issue. The rule explanations are a bit deficient in this game where it mentions you must 'return' a card but doesn't explain how or when.
Yeah, the next patch will hopefully clarify several of the rules explanations.
fantastic! I look forward to it.
Not sure I understand the rules for fork solitaire -- I am on the updated patch w/ the new rules explanation, but I often cannot create forks. I understand that I cannot create a fork ABOVE another fork, but there are many cases where I cannot create a fork below another fork too? Is there some branch limit or other unstated rule?
Here's a hastily put-together example of what I mean:
Ah, shoot; that's actually a detail not mentioned, I think - a card can't fork if it's already on a pile that has forked twice. There were a lot of these little rules mishaps in the game on release, I need to address these soon. Apologies.
no worries! thanks for the clarification.
i have noticed some of the terminology feels inconsistent between games and some is kind of ambiguous (e.g. i've gotten confused whether "below" means lower on the screen, or stacked underneath another card).
regardless i'm really enjoying the pack even though many of the variants feel slightly out of reach for me in terms of difficulty. i keep poking away at it even when i'm getting trounced. i think the aesthetic coherence and excellent music are a big part of it!
and maybe not intentional, but these rule quibbles do play into the "mystery" theme somewhat. it's been enjoyable to read between the lines in some of the games and discover that, oh, i can use monster attack slots as free cells, etc. i think most board game manuals would call these implied rules out explicitly, but i do think there is a case to be made for not spelling out too much. it gives it a unique feel, and it's sort of up to you whether you want to intentionally lean into that or not.
So this might be a long shot, but I thought $3 isn't much of a risk, so I bought the game trying to get it to work on my Android phone.
Lo and behold Löve2D plays nicely with Android. The Loader instantoy loads up your .exe.
Unfortunately the game doesn't properly scale to my phone's screen resolution so a huge chunk of the UI is off-screen.
Is there any way to hard code a specific resolution or scaling into the game logic through one of the lua files that you get when unzipping the .exe?
I'd love to get this to work for some comfy couch gaming.
I'll take a look at the possibilities of adjusting the resolution! I assume toggling fullscreen doesn't help here?
There's unfortunately no way to change how the screen behaves on my end. I've tried messing with the values in the lua files, but I have no idea what I'm doing and it doesn't seem to have any effect..
I'm able to workaround the scaling problem by changing line 9 in gamesystem.lua from "scaling = GAME.scaling or 1" to "scaling = 1". However, during game play, I cannot release a card after picking one up. Looks like touch events are not correctly handled.
I got as far by trial and error and I also have the touch input problems... Damn, this would have been perfect for my Z Fold 5...
I hope I can address these issues eventually! We have plans to add a couple more solitaires and such so there'll certainly be patches incoming.
HI! Will there be a steam release?
I hadn't planned one but several people have requested it so I might see if I can get it done later!
I’d like to buy the game, but I’d prefer to wait to buy it on Steam, unless you plan to give a key to everyone who already paid for it here. I’ve only seen a little bit of gameplay, and it looks like a fantastic game!
Thanks! I don't think you can easily set up a "give a key to people who bought it elsewhere" system on Steam so holding off for now is probably your best bet.
If you’d like to, you can set it up on itch.io so that everyone that pays for the game gets access to a Steam key. From what I understand, this also allows anyone who has previously paid for the game to claim a Steam key.
You can find more details here: Download keys - External keys
As much as I love Balatro and reasonably enjoy regular Solitaire, I haven't magically inherited nearly enough card game skill to get through a single one of these haha (except the poker one, of course)
Still, I'll keep trying... and the tunes are nice!