Golf

Goal of the game

Move all 35 cards from the seven columns onto the waste pile. As in golf, you count the extra strokes: the lowest score wins.

How it works

• Only the bottom card of each column (the one not covered by any other) can be played.
• It goes onto the waste pile if its rank is adjacent to that of the top card, whatever the suit: an 8 on a 7 or on a 9.
• At the Easy and Medium levels, the Ace and the King follow each other (wrap-around); from the Hard level, they do not. At the Devilish level, a King closes the waste pile: nothing can be played on it, you must draw.
• When no card fits, tap the stock: its card becomes the new top of the waste pile. The stock is never replenished.

Scoring

• As long as cards remain in the columns, your score is their number.
• Columns cleared: the score becomes negative and equals minus the number of cards left in the stock. A score of −6 means six cards to spare.

Controls

• Tap a playable card to send it to the waste pile; drag and drop works too.
• Keyboard: keys 1 to 7 to play a column, Space to draw, I for a hint, Ctrl+Z to undo.

About the solver

Each deal is chosen by an exact solver that plays the game with the cards face up, in a separate thread: depth-first search with a transposition table on column heights, the stock and the rank of the top card, moves ranked by the length of the chain they open, and pruning of ranks deprived of any neighbour. Difficulty is measured by the number of dead ends explored before the solution. The hint queries the same solver, so it knows the order of the stock.