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Confession time: I really love playing solitaire. I don't love it the way I love other games. I don't admire the cleverness of its design, I'm not particularly entertained by its mechanics. I love it with a deep, psychological need, an almost philosophical yearning. Of course I love clearing the cards when chance allows, enjoying the Pavlovian kick of tidying up at the core of so much gaming - but I also, in a perverse way, love it when chance allows me no such thing. It feels true. I need to be smart to win, but my loss might have been written in the cards from the start, which makes a win all the sweeter. I learned the game from my Swiss grandmother on long, languorous and hot childhood holidays in the south of France, in the Klondike form that would later be popularised as a computer game when Microsoft included it with the Windows 3.0 operating system in 1990. Back then, I knew it by its British name patience, which seems even more apt. In French it is sometimes called réussite, "success", with what I assume to be withering irony, since the possibility of success is not guaranteed. It is fair but cruel, and with its 7000 trillion possible hands, it is mathematically inscrutable. Studies estimate that around 80% of Klondike hands are theoretically winnable, though the player's imperfect knowledge of the draw introduces a gambling element that leads to unwitting mistakes and drastically lowers the win rate. Just like life.
It is for these possibly masochistic reasons that in any given year, solitaire will be one of my most-played games - recently, in Brainium's iPhone version. This year, the video game world produced a couple of variations on it that distracted me for a while. Sage Solitaire, in which you clear cards by forming poker hands from a three-by-three grid, is nicely finished and an interesting thought experiment, though I reject the designer Zach Gage's position that solitaire's capricious mystery is a bug to be fixed. It ultimately left me cold.
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