Solitair Rule Sheet development update

 I have always heard many things about Solitaire, its been around for a long time and its always showed up somewhere or other within my life. Strangely enough however I have never actually learned to play it, I love cards, I always have since a kid. Funnily enough however I have learned very few games involving cards, the main way I used them in the past has been throwing them. Tried and true form of entertainment throwing stuff. But despite this I still loved cards and their use in television and other media. Finally with this assignment I have true motivation to go and learn this game of solitaire I've heard so much of.

    Learning solitaire was an interesting endeavor. Mainly it was confusing trying to figure out what to put where through the online system I used but by the time I had played 3 solid games I had the basics down. As it progressed more and more I had to evolve my thought process on the game. I had to think of modifications I could make while learning the basics. It led to an interesting way of learning the game that I hadn't experience yet, it forced me to look at why a game was designed a certain way as I learned it, thinking proactively. My in depth look at it led to understanding two things. The goal of solitaire is to waste time. As a single player game where the goal is putting a deck of cards in order its clear that this game is meant to take a decent amount of time and put a deck in order. When considering what modifications I wanted to make the 2 clear things I wanted to be sure of was that the end result would shuffle the deck and it wouldn't restrict the player by putting a time limit. These core restrictions made me think further outside the box than I would have if I change these end results. I couldn't change many of the base fundamentals of the game at the early stage because If I went to far it wouldn't hold the same end result, So I started light, and added in something that is necessary to fully sort the deck, The Joker. The joker card is renowned for being left out of most standard card games that are made, I always found this rather annoying. I enjoy offshoot one off events in games chances for something more dynamic to interrupt the flow. So I added the jokers into the game and made them as horrible as I could imagine. They end up reshuffling the deck and losing your current strips of cards. This addition certainly added a new layer of emotion to the game, anger. When jokers come up into play they always mess with the current game flow and ruin what cards you may have been setting up. As for the next option it was a little more difficult. We played with ideas of adding in a second deck to the game. With different rules of cross deck stacking (different design decks) but overall the process looked like it would be far to exhausting to deal with, along with the play time being to lengthy. So I botched that idea and moved to the next planning stage. Continuing forward I had one core idea I wanted to add into the game, choice and recourses. At its core Solitaire doesn't have many interesting or dynamic decisions one can make during a game, I enjoy games that give questions of "Should I do this right now?" and "Is this the best move I could make." These kind of dynamics are my favorite parts about games. So I sought out to add this dynamic into solitaire. So I went and added Poker hands into it. At a time one want they can draw 5 cards (a full hand) from the deck to go for a high hand. If you end up with a good enough hand you could end up with an added benefit to the base game of solitaire. It was at first very difficult to think of ways one could get bonuses in Solitaire, but as time went on I thought of a fair few ideas to turn the tide. Between card reserves, extra slots, and 2 face up card strips I eventually worked the way up the ladder of poker hands to fit into our game.

    Overall modifying games like these have proven rather interesting to me. trying to think of the core end result of a game and maintaining its end goal while modifying the process has proven fun. However I don't feel we have done enough to change the game of solitaire enough yet. At its core I feel the game will still play as it normally does even with our additions. I hope to do some more core changes to the game overall by the next checkpoint of the assignment.