Card Games For Dummies. Barry Rigal

or right and left.

      

Although you can put any card anywhere you like in the grid, and you can expand the cards out in any direction you like, each card must touch another card. Whether you put it adjacent to another card or link it diagonally by touching the corner of another card is up to you.

      

After many years of playing Poker Patience, I’ve decided that the best way to play (particularly when using my scoring table) is for straights to be set out in one direction (vertically or horizontally) and full houses or four of a kinds in the other direction. If you take my advice and decide for straights to go in the horizontal rows, you have excellent reasons to put the cards in columns either with themselves or with numbers five less than or five more than themselves. By making this separation, you help the formation of straights.

      When playing Poker Patience, sooner or later you run into a useless or unplayable card. When this happens, don’t panic; all you have to do is start a junk row or junk column. Inevitably, at least one row or column won’t score as much as you want it to.

Look at the layout in Figure 2-10 to see the game theory at work. The matrix is updated after every two cards, although each card is turned over individually. After ten cards, the basic structure is going well. The nucleus of the straights is fine on the horizontal lines, and all the pairs are matched up.

In Figure 2-11, you can put the ♠9 on the bottom row, but completing the straight and collecting points always produces a warm, fuzzy feeling.

      FIGURE 2-10: A hand of Poker Patience after ten cards.

      FIGURE 2-11: Don’t be tempted by the bottom row. Go for the points!

Play continues in Figure 2-12. The ♥8 could’ve gone under the ♣3, but it seems premature to abandon the right-hand column. The ♠Q scores the full house, so abandon the straight in the fourth row.

      FIGURE 2-12: Dumping a straight to go for the higher-scoring full house.

In Figure 2-13, the bottom row has become a junk pile. One row or column normally does.

      FIGURE 2-13: Creating a junk pile is a normal thing for Poker Patience.

In Figure 2-14, a lucky last card allows you to scramble to respectability; two straights, two full houses, and a three of a kind are 160, and having three pairs takes you to 166.

      FIGURE 2-14: Sometimes you have to get lucky to make something out of this big mess.

After you finish playing, you can further exercise your mental agility by trying to rearrange the cards to score as many points as possible. A rearrangement is really only worth doing, however, if you have a straight flush so you can rack up big numbers. Using all the cards in high-scoring combinations (flushes or higher) is a real coup. I’ve managed this feat about five times, and on one memorable occasion, I discovered that my initial arrangement was the highest possible with the cards I was dealt. Unfortunately, a game that successful may never happen again.

      

Some people also count the long diagonals (from top right to bottom left and vice versa) in the scoring. Planning the scores on the diagonals too carefully is pretty difficult, but it can be done — or you can just regard any score on them as a bonus. You can also play Poker Patience as a competitive game for two players or more. One player calls out the cards they draw at random, and then both players try to arrange their own grids to maximize the scores. The highest score wins.

Befriending Spite and Malice

      You may legitimately grumble that Spite and Malice (also known as Cat and Mouse) is wholly out of place on the Solitaire roster. Not only does it technically not count as a Solitaire, even though its play is similar, but it also doesn’t feature a single deck of cards. No matter: Spite and Malice is one of the finest competitive card games I know.

      You can play the game with any number of card decks; surprisingly, it really doesn’t matter whether the decks are complete or not. The alternative is to play with just two decks, but that leads to unnecessary reshuffling. You generally play the game with two players, although in theory there’s no player limitation. It works for three or four players equally well or as a partnership game with four.

The object of Spite and Malice is very similar to Canfield (see the section “Reserving Your Time for Canfield,” earlier in this chapter): You have a reserve pile that you want to get rid of before your opponent can.

      Getting started

      The preliminaries are very straightforward. Each player shuffles the decks very thoroughly, and you cut for deal, with the lowest card dealing. The dealer gives their opponent and themselves 26 (or 20 if you want a shorter game) cards face-down. These cards are your reserve, or pay-off pile, which both players try to dispose of; you always turn the top card face-up, and it remains available for play during the game. The dealer takes the remainder of the cards, the stock, and deals five cards to each player, which form the player’s hand. The remaining stock cards sit in the middle of the table for the players to replenish their hands in due course. You can dispose of the reserve cards by putting them onto four communal foundation piles, built up from ace to queen, at the right moment. Each player can put cards onto the foundation piles, or onto waste piles, to which they each alone have access.

      Putting the moves on

      The nondealer is first to play. If you find yourself in this position, you have a series of options:

       You can start off building on the communal foundation piles (or center stacks), which work their way up, always starting from the ace and going all the way through to the queen. Suits are irrelevant for this game, and kings are wild cards that you can use for anything you like (some people don’t allow a wild card to represent an ace).

       You can build onto the foundation with the five cards in your hand or from the waste pile, but you should prefer to use your reserve — remember, the object of the game is to get rid of your reserve. Suits are irrelevant for building on the foundation. A maximum of four open foundation piles are allowed at any one time. When a pile is complete from ace to queen, you set it aside and create a new space. You can put out cards from these three locations in any order at any time during your turn.Some people play kings as normal cards and use two jokers per deck. In this version of the game, you keep the two decks of cards separate. The dealer uses