July 28, 2003
spider
Update: after playing 123 games, I’ve finally won my first one. It took 268 moves and 49:18. However, the victory was sullied, since I had to use undo. In my defense, I did not use the knowledge gained from cards revealed and then covered back up; rather, I saw that I should have used different strategery, and backed up to the point where I could use it.
I have lost vast amounts of my life this weekend as I’ve discovered an addicting solitaire variant known as “spider”. Getting a free version to work on Mac OS X was a bit of hassle, but here’s how I did it.
- Follow the instruction on Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ page for installing python, as the version that’s included with OS X doesn’t have Tkinter built in.
- Get the excellent pysol package. After uncompressing the tarball, you’ll want to edit the pysol shell script to point to your new version of python (/sw/bin/python).
- Open an xterm (not the Terminal app, but real xterm), and now you can execute pysol.
- Play spider solitaire and lose hours of your life.
Note that pysol should also work on Windows, provided you have a decent python distribution. I haven’t verified this, however.
In any case, I’ve played over a hundred games, and haven’t won once. The best I’ve done is to clear a single suit to the top row, and I only managed that about 3 times. I still suck, even after reading the spider solitaire strategy. Sucking sucks.
