Unsolvable FreeCell
Published Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
During work breaks (when I can take one) I like to play a game or two of solitaire on my Siemens SX66 PDA Phone. Lately I’ve been playing FreeCell (thanks to FreeCell for Pocket PC by nandhp). I had gotten to the point that I could win every game (with a few undoes). I began to wonder if there was a solution to every game. Turns out FreeCell is one of the most popular solitaire games because it has the one of the highest win rates of any solitaire (see FreeCell — Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) written by Michael Keller). There are some deals that are unsolvable. With this knowledge my game playing strategy changed. I no longer wanted to simply play free cell but actually solve every single game I was presented with. Needless to say this often takes many undoes or a restart. Up to the other day I had solved every one presented to me (about 35 games). Well, I finally hit one that I couldn’t solve…. unfortunately it had nothing to do with the deal. The game simply cheated. Take a close look at this screenshot.
December 24th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Try #8591
January 8th, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I have had this same situation twice, it occurs when you use the undo function, I believe. For instance in the game in which you provided the screen shot, at some point in the game you most likely moved the 3 of clubs, three 4’s, two 5’s, the 6 of clubs and 7 of diamonds and then proceeded to undo the move, rather than move the cards back where it came from, the cards simply vanished. So the programmer has a small glitch in the undo function, no big deal, just watch intently each time you undo a move look to see if icards dissappears!
January 8th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
I figured it was a bug due to the undo. Just thought it was funny.
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
you get what you pay for :)
August 13th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Thanks for your report. I have fixed this bug in version 1.5, which I released today.
Thanks,
nandhp