Flipflop Solitaire
Zach Gage, 2017
Custom Software
Flipflop Solitaire is a new deep and unrestrictive solitaire variant. (iOS download here)
In Flipflop you can stack down, up, or even both ways on a single stack!
Need to stack an 8 on a 7, or a club on a spade? No problem!
- but -
Be careful, you can only move a stack of a single suit!
It's fun and freeing, but still challenging and captivating.
It's Flipflops for your brain.
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Flipflop Solitaire is sort of a sequel to Sage Solitaire in the sense that it's my second crack at the design problem of making a Solitaire game that feels like it was designed for your phone and not for a table.
To be honest this is how I wish everyone approached sequels. Usually a sequel takes the solution to a problem and duplicates it. This is why our expectations of game sequels is more-of-the-same-but-better rather than a deeper level of surprise, and novel ideas.
While Sage was all about trying to capture the feeling of a tight, easy to play, tough to win, zen solitaire game, Flipflop is about knots. In a typical Solitaire game, like Klondike, you're taking a knot of cards and untying it into sequences of cards. Then you reverse those sequences into clean ordered stacks. In Flipflop you take a knot of cards, tie that knot into other, hopefully better knots, and then untie those knots into the final ordered stacks. The big change is the second step. In Flipflop you have an incredible amount of control over the way you construct your intermediary knots, because in Flipflop you can stack your cards, up, down, or both, irregardless of suit.
The genesis of Flipflop was discovering the joy of Spider Solitaire. Specifically I fell in love with the way Spider Solitaire handles difficulty. Unlike other Solitaire games, Spider is designed to be played at 3 different difficulties: 1-Suit (treat all cards the same), 2-Suit (red or black), and 4-Suit (spade, heart, diamond, club). I've never really seen a game approach difficulty in this way. Instead of offering up vague easy, medium, and hard modes, Spider gives the player a knob that affects a specific game mechanic that they understand. It's more like letting the player make a home-rule rather than asking them for a difficulty setting. It's kind of like if Super Mario let you play with 1 life (no extras), 3 lives, or infinite lives... Except it's actually weirder, because in Spider when you change the number of suits you're not just adjusting the difficulty, you're actually changing the scope of the problem. It's like picking the size of a Rubiks Cube you want to solve.
The thing about this crazy way to do difficulty is that it results in a really interesting play structure. Two amazing player behaviors happen naturally:
1: Players feel comfortable at whatever level they choose. Nobody who plays only 1-suit feels bad about playing "easy mode". Each players assumes everyone else plays at their speed.
2: Players tend to switch clear differences in difficulties back-and-forth on a whim. 2-Suit players, who are tired, occasionally switch down to 1-Suit, and everyone occasionally has a go at 4-Suit.
The first behavior is rare and I think a bit of a holy-grail in terms of accessibility design, and it is hard for me to even come up with an example of a game where people do the second behavior.
So why not just play the heck out of Spider Solitaire? Well, for one, when I discover a gorgeous new mechanic to design, I want to try it out for myself... but also, Spider Solitaire has ten freaking piles! Spider Solitaire is an ugly nightmare of teeny tiny cards and huge areas of empty space on phones.
My initial idea was to just cut the piles in half, and double the control that the player had. So 5 Piles, and instead of stacking down, you could stack up or down. Not only did this work right away, but it actually handed a good dose of creativity and control to the player. Suddenly the number of options in any given situation ballooned and was pretty exciting to me.
Solitaire is primarily a game of pattern-recognition, sort of like a word-search but with cards. "Oh I can move this whole stack here" or "hey I need that 4, so if I can only locate a King to drop this Queen on". So expanding the possibility space for moves deepens the problem and the skill by an order of magnitude. Now Spider Solitaire is like a word search where the letters get removed after you find the words and everything collapses down. Oh wait, that's SpellTower! Anyway, what I'm trying to say is I released a new game. It feels a lot like Solitaire, but it also feels pretty different and it raises some interesting ideas around topics like sequels, difficulty, and accessibility.