mindless supermoves in freecell

evanbrimstone

Today's game is another example of how supermoves have made freecell more or less mindless. I solved it in 17 seconds just by clicking on whatever columns had aces, then whatever columns had the next number I needed on the suit piles, and so on. It reqired no strategy whatsoever. I did not play the game ahead of time and memorize the moves. Try it, you'll see that it's not necessary:

http://greenfelt.net/freecell?game=722535556

It doesn't work that way on every game, but it does on a lot of them.

jim

evanbrimstone wrote:

Today's game is another example of how super moves have made freecell more or less mindless. I solved it in 17 seconds just by clicking on whatever columns had aces, then whatever columns had the next number I needed on the suit piles, and so on. It reqired no strategy whatsoever. I did not play the game ahead of time and memorize the moves. Try it, you'll see that it's not necessary: 722535556

It doesn't work that way on every game, but it does on a lot of them.

The super moves are limited to obvious moves, so I think what you are seeing is that Free Cell is often just not that hard. I consider it drudgery to do the obvious moves myself, so I like to be able to control the game at a high level and just control the decision points.

I think I've suggested this before, but you might Sea Haven Towers or Spider. The former being very similar to, but harder than, Free Cell, and later being different and much harder.

Thanks for the thoughtful post,
-Jim

PS There is one problem with our implementation of super moves for Free Cell (but not for Sea Haven Towers) which is that it will arbitrarily choose one of two moves of the same card (one of two red 3s, say). We've considered forcing the user to decide in that case, but we're not convinced that that wouldn't be overly restrictive.