Games, Diversions & Perl Culture

Chapter 30. Tktk: A Perl/Tk Solitaire Game

Greg Bacon

One evening, I saw my wife playing a solitaire game that I’d never seen before, and whose name I still don’t know. I asked her to explain the rules. The game turns out to be a simpler variation of Pyramid, which is described at http://www.semicolon.com/solitaire/rules/pyramidrules.html.

The Rules

To play, you lay out the cards in a seven row pyramid. The first row contains one card, the second two, and so on. When laying subsequent rows, you should cover each card in the previous row with two cards (picture the running bond pattern from brick masonry), as shown in Figure 30-1.

If you want to impress your solitaire aficionado buddies, call these 28 cards the tableau. The rest of the cards are the stock. To play, place the stock’s bottom card face up on top of the stock. This top card is called the base. Your goal is to pick up all the cards in the tableau. You may pick up any uncovered card whose denomination or rank is adjacent to the denomination of the base card, regardless of suit. For instance, if your base card is a six, you can pick up a five or seven. Aces are considered adjacent to both deuces and kings.

When you pick up a card from the tableau, it becomes the new base card. When you decide that you want a new base card (usually when you can’t pick up any more from the tableau), you flip from the bottom of the stock. The game is over when you empty the tableau (you win) or when you exhaust the stock (you lose).

It turned out ...