Featured Puzzle: Hide and Seek Solitaire
On this day in 1990, Microsoft added Solitaire to Windows 3.0, as an entertaining way to get users accustomed to using their mouse. At the time, most people were migrating from DOS, which required all commands to be typed. In 2018, they decided to claim the day as National Solitaire Day.
In this grid, we’ve dealt what looks to be a game in the Scorpion Solitaire family, but for some reason, the deck included the Jokers and Aces upside-down! Using a few clues, can you figure out where each of them is placed?
- The Jokers are in adjacent columns.
- One Ace shares no suit with its column or row.
- The Ace in a 5-card straight row is somewhere to the left of the Ace of Spades.
- Only two Aces form a 2×2 area of the same color.
- One Ace is surrounded by two Kings of the opposite color.
Congratulations! For an additional challenge, take a deck of cards and duplicate this layout. then try to solve it with these variant Scorpion Solitaire rules:
- Build card sequences down in suit from King to Ace.
- Groups of cards may be moved regardless of suit.
- Any card may be moved, but all cards covering it are moved as well.
- Empty columns may be filled by any card
- Jokers are wild and may be used to represent any card in a sequence when using them to build.
- You may not build down on an Ace, even with Jokers.
