Easy Difficulty

Continuing my experimentation with Microsoft Spider Solitaire, I decided to try five hands on Expert difficulty level.

Recall that Expert is the easiest possible setting when you play with 4 suits. We therefore expect Expert hands will be easier than random hands.

Indeed when I tried playing Five hands at Expert level I crushed it. I won the first four hands and probably should have won the fifth, but for a lapse in concentration.

Getting trips (or even quads) when dealing a row of 10 cards occurred very rarely, and I had a healthy number of turnovers in round 0. Once I removed two complete suits the game was pretty much in the bag.

However, I should emphasize that removing two suits most definitely does not guarantee victory for Grandmaster level. And don’t get me started on Rogue Solitaire.

Recall that in a previous post, I ran the Gauranteed Minimum Evaluation Score on hands of various difficulty. Ninja Monkey said that he could win 4 Experts hands out of 50, but zilch on Master and Nada on Grandmaster.

I haven’t experimented with what various difficulty levels look like with fewer than 4 suits. Perhaps that’s some material for a future post 😊

Personally I like the idea of giving players the option of choosing a difficulty level as well as number of suits, and Spider Solitaire lends itself to this type of choose-your-difficulty. In contrast, the same cannot be said of games like Klondike or Freecell (one-suit is perhaps too easy even for a newbie)

Until next time, happy Spider Solitaire playing.