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Solitaire: Joker's Gambit Postmortem! (V3)

 

  • Group 5

  • Solitaire: Joker’s Gambit is a modified version of Solitaire in which the inclusion of the Joker cards provides a new layer of depth and strategy to the game. Managing your Jokers carefully will allow you to gain an edge, but get careless and you’ll risk ending your game!!

  • Target Audience: Puzzle Solvers, Fans of Solitaire who want to play the game with a new twist/challenge


Solitaire: Extreme! Has changed a lot since my last post here! Our playtests of the second iteration of this project had brought a significant problem to light. The game just felt like Solitaire. This I believe stemmed from two factors: One, the consequence of moving a face down card to the stock or tableau didn't end up being as impactful as we had hoped, as either way it would just be found again later without any adjustment to the  strategy used. Second, the Joker cards would be taken out of circulation after they were triggered, meaning that once both had been used, the game was entirely the same as Standard Solitaire. Solving these issues was our main goal as we entered into our third revision, and we've finished it with a complete overhaul of the Joker mechanics!


Playing so much Solitaire lately has had me thinking a lot about card games, and I was inspired by another one I had played, Exploding Kittens. In that game you draw cards from a deck, and if you get an exploding kitten card, you're out. But, if you have a defuse card (which each player receives) then you're saved and have to discard that. Being forced to use a defuse and being left at the mercy of potentially drawing a game over card added what I call Stages of Intensity to the game. The first stage being the feeling of safety when you have one or more defuse cards, and the second being tension when you're without one and could face game over the next time you draw from the deck.

Exploding Kittens: Defuse Cards (Top) and Exploding Kitten Cards (Bottom)


I thought that I could also utilize these stages of intensity in Solitaire, since there are two Jokers. My idea was that drawing two Jokers meant game over. My intention with this was that the player would start in the  first stage, feeling safe, and then drawing a joker would put them into the second stage, fearful that they could trigger a game over at any moment.


However, one problem was that it was inevitable that every card in the game would eventually have to be turned face up in order for the player to achieve victory, and therefore it was near impossible that someone could win without having drawn both Jokers. Therefore, there needed to be a way for the Player to go from Intensity  Stage 2 back to Stage 1. Here I was also able to give the Jokers even more depth, by transforming them into not just an obstacle but a tool. 


Joker cards are typically used as wilds, so I thought that I could incorporate that and tap into some general playing card tropes that are easy to understand, with the catch that Jokers could only substitute as cards of their color. Furthermore, finding the card that a Joker is substituting would allow you to replace the Joker and "diffuse" it like you would an Exploding Kitten, by placing it within the face down cards of the tableau. This procedure also solved the problem of the game becoming indistinguishable from normal solitaire once the Jokers have served their purpose and gone out of circulation.


Joker Card being Substituted for a Black 3 (Left)

Joker Card being replaced and moved back into the deck (Right)


From here, I playtested this new version of Solitaire, and after creating a rough draft of our new rule sheet, had my partner try it as well using only the rules I had written down. We took note of what my partner needed help understanding, which allowed us to avoid ending the playtest due to confusion and show us which areas of the game needed to be better defined. After we had both refined the rule sheet together, My partner was able to playtest with a roommate using only the rule sheet, and it was a success!! The busy weekend hadn't given me time to run a playtest on my end like I would have liked, but I think that our rule sheet turned out very well and easy to understand for Solitaire Players.


Overall I feel very proud of our finished product! Going into this assignment I felt very nervous. The rules of Solitaire create a delicate system that when modified, can often lead to unwinnable games. Even more, I worried about how I would make something fun to play as well. Though by working together with my partner, and applying the knowledge I've learned in this course, along with outside inspiration, I've ended up with a game that I'm happy that I made, and that I think is pretty fun and has a fair amount of added depth to it as well. I'm once again nervous for the next project, since we're starting from scratch, but this time I'm more excited as I feel I have more tools and more experience to aid me in the game development process!


Patch Notes


-Reworked the Joker Mechanics

-Jokers now have two states: Face-Up and Face-Down, Jokers become face up as soon as they are uncovered and remain so until turned Face-Down

-Face-Up Jokers can substitute as any card of the Joker’s color

-Face-Up Jokers can be replaced by the card they are substituting for once it is found. This will turn the Joker face down and place it 2 cards deep into the face down cards of the tableau pile it is occupying (at the back of the pile if there are less than 2 face down cards)

-If both Jokers are Face-Up at any given time, the game ends


-The Rule Sheet has been reformatted into two sections like before, a how to play section for players familiar with Solitaire, and a section to teach players how to play Standard Solitaire

-This change made in V2 was reverted because we felt that combining these two rulesets made players already familiar with solitaire feel like they were sorting through unnecessary reading to find the new rules they needed to get started.

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