by Greg Schwartz

Created on: September 08, 2009

Almost everyone who works at a computer is familiar with Windows Solitaire. That plain green background has burned itself into many, many monitors over the years. The game is simple yet addictive, and it makes a boring work day go by much faster.

Solitaire can be found in the Games folder in most versions of Windows (Start > Programs > Games > Solitaire). Many types of Solitaire abound, but Windows Solitaire is a basic version that is very easy to learn if you've never played.

When you start a game, you'll be greeted with seven stacks of cards. The stacks hold from one to seven cards each, and the top card of each stack is flipped up. At the top left of the screen is the deck, with all of the remaining cards, and at the upper right are four empty spots, where the cards will be stacked later in the game.

The object of the game is to fill the four vacant spots, one per suite, with the cards of that suite in ascending order - from ace all the way up to king. Once you've stacked all four suites up there, you win.

You can bring cards from your deck down to the seven stacks, but you can only place them in exact descending order (you can't put a four on a three, for example) and they must alternate colors. For example, the only cards you can place on a black eight are either a seven of hearts or a seven of diamonds.

In addition to just trying to win, you can also play for scoring. There are two different scoring methods you can play by - standard and Vegas style. Standard starts you at zero points, and you get 10 points for every card you move to one of your four empty stacks. Vegas style plays by money - you start with -$52 and you get $5 back for every card you put up into the empty stacks. With Vegas style you can choose to make your score cumulative, so that every time you start a new game the dealer takes another $52. The scoring is purely for your benefit while playing; the game does not keep track of high scores.

There are several other options you can use to customize your game of solitaire. You can play a timed game, and you can choose whether to deal one card or three cards at a time. You can also change the design on the back of the cards.

A large part of solitaire is luck - which cards are in your deck and which are in your stacks - but it also requires a bit of skill. The skill comes into play when you decide whether to move a king over to an empty stack or bring one down from your deck, or whether to move a card to your four empty stacks or to keep it in play to try to free up some other cards.

Solitaire is not a complex game, and it doesn't have amazing graphics or gameplay. But it is a simple game requiring very little computer memory, and it's a great alternative to boredom.

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