Nokia Solitaire

What if the Nokia 3310 had solitaire?

Controls

Action	Keyboard	Numpad (Nokia keypad)
Select	Space / Return / Enter	5
Back	Backspace / Delete / Escape	7
Draw card	E / Ctrl	0
Move	Arrow keys / WASD	8426

How to play

This kind of solitaire is known as Klondike. It uses a standard deck of 52 playing cards which are shuffled and laid out at the start of the game in a staircase shape. Here is one possible layout:

The staircase is called the tableau and each column is called a depot. The remaining cards in the top left corner are called the stock. The goal of the game is to stack all of the cards in ascending order (from Ace to King) in the four positions in the top right, called the foundations. For example once the Ace of Spades has been placed into one of the foundations, the 2 of Spades can be placed on top of that, then the 3 of Spades and so on. The game is won if all cards in all suits are stacked on the foundations.

Cards in the tableau can be moved on top of each other in descending value (from King to Ace) so long as their suits are opposite colors. This game is monochrome, but the Spades and Clubs suits are traditionally black, while the Hearts and Diamonds suits are traditionally red. For example in the tableau the 6 of Spades can be placed on top of the 7 of Hearts or the 7 of Diamonds. If a face-down card in the tableau is uncovered, it gets turned over and can then be played. A stack of alternating descending cards can be moved together as one, for example the 7 of Diamonds with the 6 of Spades on top of it can be moved together on top of either the 8 of Clubs or 8 of Spades.

The remaining cards can be drawn from the stock to the space next to it, called the waste. Once all the cards in the stock have been turned to the waste, they are returned to the stock in the same order. The stock can be passed through repeatedly. The topmost card in the waste can be played into the tableau or directly onto one of the foundations. Cards cannot be put back into the stock or waste once played.

Here is the 52 card deck. The suits are Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs. Each suit has 13 cards: Ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, Ten, Jack, Queen, King.

Difficulty options

Press Back to drop your selected card, or else open the pause menu. From here you can re-deal the cards or change the difficulty options.

• Draw: 1 / 2 / 3 (default 3). How many cards are drawn at a time from the stock to the waste. Only the topmost card in the waste can be played, so a higher number makes the game harder
• Vacant: Kings / Any (default Kings). Once some cards have been moved around there may be vacant depots in the tableau. By default only Kings can fill these vacancies, but allowing any card to makes the game easier
• Take back: Yes / No (default Yes). Sometimes it's useful to take a card that was moved to a foundation back into the tableau in order to move other cards around. Disallowing this makes the game harder
• Tableau: Hidden / Shown (default Hidden). Initially only the topmost card in each depot is face-up, with subsequent cards only being revealed once uncovered. Having all cards in the tableau face-up makes the game easier
• Stack: Opposites / Any (default Opposites). Cards in the tableau can only be stacked in descending order. Normally they can also only be stacked on alternating suit colors, but allowing cards to be stacked on any suit color makes the game easier

The default difficulty options are setup to match classic Klondike. Due to the randomly shuffled cards and restrictions on card placement, only about 1 in 30 games of classic Klondike is actually winnable.

About

This project was created in a few days for Nokia Jam 5. The goal was to make something matching the restrictions of the old indestructible Nokia 3310 phone. The main constraints were the two-color palette and the 84x48 resolution.

I find it fun to re-imagine common software under such tight constraints. My Nokia Jam 3 entry was the Nokia eReader, a book reading app.

Source Code and Licenses

The source code for this project is available on GitHub under the MIT license. The Nokia font was recreated by Zeh Fernando and is also freely redistributable.