Solitaire Solution

How It Works

There's only one game to play, and it's beatable, but it just redeals when you beat it. Clearly, there was something more. The backs of the cards were a big hint: they read "A♦ = A♣ 52/2". Half of 52 is 26, which is a very important number to puzzlers - you can use a deck of cards to encode exactly two alphabets, and the ace of diamonds is the same as the ace of clubs here. The entire message is encoded in the down cards, some of which are visible, and when decoded read "WAYTOGO". Teams then had to reveal the rest of the cards through the regular mechanic of solitaire, to reveal the entire message:

WSARDGR AUNHIE YBSUN TMWM OIE GT O

Or "WAY TO GO SUBMIT ANSWER HUMDINGER". (The cards in the deal deck are just there to make the actual game playable.)

Design Notes

This puzzle was conceived of and had a fully-working implementation in the span of about 24 hours.

Andy originally implemented this using the Vista version of solitaire (because he had a machine with Vista source on it that he could hack at). Eventually, Derek re-implemented it with sol.exe for greater machine compatibility. (And that olde-worlde flavore.)

Justin is credited with helping build this puzzle because he got the original vista version running on XP (but you had to install the DirectX runtime).

One of the original designs of this puzzle had the solitaire game be completely unwinnable, but with multiple dead ends that would enable you (with good bookkeeping) to resolve all the cards. This proved really hard to figure out, as solitaire solvability is actually an NP-complete problem. We settled for messing with the deal deck until we found a winnable game.

Solitaire has a cheat it in where CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and clicking the deal deck causes it to deal cards singly. We modified that hack to be LEFT ALT+RIGHT CTRL+RIGHT SHIFT and click, so that it (hopefully) was less discoverable and would enable us to provide the cheat as a hint for teams that really sucked at playing solitaire.

GC Notes

Nearly all teams were skipped over this puzzle. This made Andy sad. 😛