WinABit is not just a game of chance. You have to make decisions, and if you loose a game, it might be because you made a mistake somewhere. The objective is to keep as many cards as possible in your hand but still be able to turn all play stack cards face up.
WinABit and Klondike solitaire both start with seven play stacks on the table but arranged a little differently. Klondike has 21 face down, WinABit 24. The play is similar, but more is allowed in WinABit.
Standard Klondike solitaire is purely a game of chance, and a little discouraging, or at least it is for me. It's designed to be very hard to win, taking something like 20 tries for one success. So I changed the rules to get a game that for me is more fun to play. With WinABit there is reasonable hope of winning even for a beginner,
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with your chance of winning improving as you play more and learn the game.
And the objective is more upbeat. How high a score you can get? Or better yet if you keep a record, can you learn with time and improve your score?
Your score is the number of cards left in your hand deck when all play stack cards are face up. Or if you had to "cheat" to finish, you get a negative score equal to the number of cheats.
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A cheat is just pulling out one of the face-down cards and playing it.
It takes a while to learn this game, apparently something like a thousand plays or more. As you can see at the right, I've played the game almost 1100 times, now, and it looks as though my average score is still going up. I've gotten in the habit of playing a couple games last thing at night just before lights out.
I got a perfect score of 21 once. That was game 212, and I thought at the time that maybe I'd keep playing until it happened again. But 865 games later I've had two scores of 20 and no 21. My worst loosing score was a -11, but that was game 4 before I'd caught on to how to play. I definitely have fewer negative scores now. And really interesting is that if someone is watching me play I seem to make more mistakes. Hum.
Rules:
Standard Klondike solitaire is described at Solitaire Central:
Cards played face up onto the four aces stacks must be in suit and numerically increasing.
Cards played face up onto play stacks alternate in color and are numerically decreasing.
Game win is no play stack cards left face down. (Same as all cards on the aces stacks.)
To make it easier to win, WinABit allows the following plays:
1) Every card in the hand deck is turned over one at a time rather than three at a time.
2) Kings can start a new play stack, so there can be up to eleven play stacks.
3) Cards can be moved between play stacks one or a set at a time.
4) Cards can be added either numerically up or down to the play-stack sequence.
5a) For scoring, cheats count as -1. Remaining hand deck cards now contribute 0.
5b) The first cheat counts as -2, others as -1, with remaining hand deck cards each +1.
Explanation of Rule 4 with Example of Finesse:
If three of your play stacks look like the picture at the right, do not play the two of spades (left play stack) onto its ace stack. The reason is that playing the black ten (middle play stack) onto the red Jack (right play stack) might turn up a red ace (in the middle play stack). If that happens, do not move the ace to start a new aces stack. Instead, first move the four card set of black 2, red 3, black 4, red 5 to be under the new red ace (now face up in middle play stack) with numeric ascending order. Only after that should the new red ace be moved to start a new aces stack. This finesse maneuver achieves the turning up of an additional face down play stack card.
Explanation of rule 5: The games that I've played to date and the data shown are for rule 5a. Compared to 5b, this increases the number of negative scores and tends to penalize a player who makes mistakes. I think I'll switch to rule 5b, though. That will require the player to keep thinking about what hand deck cards to play, or not—which is more consistent with the rest of WinABit solitaire.