We’ve all been there.
Playing Spider Solitaire is no longer fun. Winning is too easy, even at the four-suit level, sans ZeeKee (as George will say) and playing an online server that is known to be biased #yeahright. Not enough frustration in our lives? Do you need more challenges to keep life meaningful?
Enter our old friend, the Cheevo.
Originally used to describe achievements earned through various games on the Xbox360 and other platforms, the C-word has been made universal throughout all kinds of games, including cerebral pursuits that don’t involve the curse of Nintendo Thumb. Cheevos are not the official goal(s) the protagonist is trying to obtain, but are optional extras invented by game fanatics who crave an extra challenge.
For instance, I once beat a very strong chess player without moving my queen off her starting square. My opponent blundered horribly and had to give up the material equivalent of four pawns for no compensation. He immediately resigned – but had he been paying more attention to my queen throughout the game he might have continued playing out of spite, just to wreck my cheevo. Chess fans may recall that Magnus Carlsen pulled off a similar feat against Viswanathan Anand (and also promoting a pawn to a second queen!) Similarly, a poker expert might hope to win first prize in a home game without ever showing down AA in Texas Holdem. And of course, every serious bridge player above the legal drinking age knows the significance of the Seven of Diamonds!
So, what possible cheevos can we have in Spider Solitaire? The short answer is you are only limited by your imagination.
For instance, one cheevo is to remove all eight suits in the last eight moves of the game. I suspect this will be very difficult with four suits sans ZeeKee, even for an expert player. Another cheevo might be some form of multi-tasking, such as improvising a rap song describing your thought processes while simultaneously playing to the best of your ability. What other cheevos can you think of? Remember that you are only limited by your imagination!
Edifying Thoughts of a Spider Solitaire Addict 
Hmmmm. Well, OK, I’ll give this a try but it seems kind of vague. “Use your imagination” is fine, but then we could make pretty patterns with the cards on the floor.
But here are a few ideas.
Win the game without doing any deals. 🙂
Remove a suit before doing the third deal.
Have two or more spaces before doing the third deal (before you fill them up to allow the deal, naturally).
Remove the suits in order two at a time, e.g. one spade suit then the other one, one club suit and the other one…
There’s some advantage to doing things that happen early rather than late. If you sweat through 4 deals and only then can really get started on your task, that’s not so fun because lots of the time you won’t get that far. With that in mind,
Aim to reach a position where you are unable to make any moves as quickly as possible. Like, uncover 5 cards or less. Simple strategy things like if you have 3, 4, 5, move the 3 onto the 4 first, so you are unable to move the 4.
You can pose obscure problems. Suppose in the opening the only move we have made is the 4 of hearts on 5 of spades. The only other move at the moment is that we have a 9 of clubs, and a choice of two 10s to put it on, diamonds or spades. Can you find a reason to do one or the other? I can think of a couple pointing one direction, but there may be some pointing the other way. Not really a “cheevo” but a sort of specific puzzle.
Maybe I’ll think of more later.
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An interesting cheevo in Scrabble would be playing the word CHEEVO without having it challenged off! For some reason CHEEVO is not valid in the latest tournament dictionary – so it seems your best bet is playing in a tournament that penalises a player for incorrectly challenging a word (rules for incorrect challenges vary in different areas of the world but it is universally agreed that the result of a correct challenge is the offending player loses his turn).
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I am happy to report that MS SS Master Level is proving to be much more difficult them Expert Level.
But it is still a dance to the puppeteer’s whim. I am half way through my 25 game test and have encountered two interesting “What da’……s”. One had me staring at seven kings arrayed in seven columns upon the first draw. I lost that one. In another hand I placed an ace at the bottom of column six on the deal and then four straight draws placed an ace below that one so I had five aces stacked. I lost that one.
As far as the current topic is concerned: During my two suit playing days I had the idea of just dealing out all the cards before starting to move. At this point I was playing two suit san ZeeKee. I won on the first try, then proceeded to lose about twenty in a row, most without gaining a single turnover. But that might be fun to try at the lowest level of four suit in MS SS.
Master T I agree that MS SS can be a good place to play because you can pick your level of pain.
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I tried the idea of dealing all cards in four-suit. It’s not fun, even at the lowest level 😦 Starting with dealing a single extra row regardless of the initial 10 cards might be an idea for Expert level.
BTW, I forgot to mention one possible cheevo in Toy Blast is beating a level on the very last move with double Rubik’s Cubes 🙂
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