moving 2 cards to an empty space

Anonymous

Game: fortythieves
Game #: 1247082451
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_4; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.204 Safari/534.16

Please describe the problem in detail:

i've noticed that with one empty space, you can move 2 cards to a cell with cards, but not to the empty space. why does this happen? when there are no empty spots, you can move one card. when there is one empty space, you should be able to move 2 cards, regardless of if the moving process would use that empty space.

david

yoyoeyes3000 wrote:

i've noticed that with one empty space, you can move 2 cards to a cell with cards, but not to the empty space. why does this happen? when there are no empty spots, you can move one card. when there is one empty space, you should be able to move 2 cards, regardless of if the moving process would use that empty space.

The actual rules for Forty Thieves say that you can move only one card at a time, ever. Incidentally that is also the rule for Sea Haven Towers, Freecell and Flower Garden, so everything I'm about to say applies to those games too.

So the real question is, why do we let you move 2 cards when there's an open spot? Doesn't that violate the rules? It doesn't violate the rules: the reason is that the game is simulating the single moves behind your back. First the top card (I'll call it card A) moves into the open spot. Second, the next card down (card moves to the real destination. Finally, the card A moves out of the previously empty space and on top of card B.

We call these "super moves". We like them because they don't violate the game rules but they save a bunch of mechanical card shuffling.

It follows from these rules that you can't move 2 cards into an open space.
You can perhaps see that it's impossible to get the bottom card (card into the space because the top card (card A) had to go there first so you could even move card B in the first place.

If you want to see for yourself you can try to play the game without using the super moves--only move a single card at a time and you can see what you can and can't do. I recommend playing the game that way at least once. Long time players of Green Felt might remember that there was a time before we implemented super moves and you could actually only move one card at a time.

-David

jim

yoyoeyes3000 wrote:

Game: fortythieves

I've noticed that with one empty space, you can move 2 cards to a cell with cards, but not to the empty space. why does this happen? when there are no empty spots, you can move one card. when there is one empty space, you should be able to move 2 cards, regardless of if the moving process would use that empty space.

The rule in Forty Thieves is that you can only move one card at a time.

So, if you want to drag two cards what you'd really be doing is moving the top lower valued card into the empty spot, then moving the second higher valued card where you want to put it, then you'd remove the lower valued card from the previously empty spot and put it back on top the card it used to be on.

Now think about moving two cards to the empty spot using the real one-card-at-a-time rule. First you'd move the top card to a second empty slot, then you'd move the bottom card to the first empty slot, then move the top card back on top of the bottom card that now in the previously empty first slot. i.e. moving to an empty slot is different than moving to a non-empty slot as the slot you are moving to can't count in the "number of empty slots" that it takes to move a stack.

-Jim