Card Games
Version History
Cards 0.98, released 2.12.2005
- Works in Firefox 1.5 (and earlier), but no longer works in the Mozilla Suite 1.x. I'll add support for Seamonkey whenever it starts using Firefox's extensions manager.
- Some new games (Double Klondike, Pile On, Union Square, and a draw-three version of Canfield)
- Got rid of the difficulty level menu (difficulty levels are treated as separate games now).
- You can hide games that you don't play often.
- Added help for most games.
- Now uses single left click (rather than right click) to have a card be moved somewhere sensible, and single right click (rather than double left click) to have a card moved to an appropriate foundation pile.
- The interface is no longer disabled while animations are occurring.
- Some games no longer have scoring.
- There are just two versions of Golf, rather than three, and both allow you to put a King on an Ace (and vice versa).
- The Hint button is disabled in games with no hints, rather than just doing nothing. If it's enabled but does nothing that means there aren't any moves that aren't completely obvious (such as moving something into a space, or dealing from the stock).
Cards 0.16, released 16.12.2004
- Fixed a serious bug seen in v0.15 where sometimes Cards would get stuck playing Sanibel, and not allow switching to any other game.
- Works with v1.8a (and 1.8a2 etc.) of the Mozilla Suite
- Added Forty Thieves. A reasonably well known game, but here's a brief summary of the rules:
- Two decks of cards are used.
- The foundations are built Ace to King, in suit.
- Cards can be dealt one at a time from the stock to the waste. There is no redeal.
- The ten main piles (the ones at the bottom) are built down in suit (i.e. a 10 of clubs can only have a 9 of clubs placed on it), spaces being filled with any card. Only a single card may be moved at once (not a run); though for convenience Cards will let you drag more than one around, but will check that there are enough spaces that you could have moved the group using a sequence of moves of single cards.
- Added Penguin (as seen in PySol)
- The card at the bottom of the left-most pile when the cards are first dealt is called the Beak. Foundations are built up in suit, starting from the number/rank of the Beak (and wrapping round from King to Ace if need be), and three of them start with their first card in.
- The cells (the seven initially-empty piles across the top) can each hold any single card.
- The main piles are built down in suit; spaces may be filled with any card with a rank immediately below that of the Beak (e.g. if the Beak is a 4 then any 3 may be put in a space). Runs of cards may be moved together (provided they're build down in suit).
- Added Demon, a variant of Canfield where the contents of the reserve pile (the 13 cards on the right) can be seen, allowing for more-strategic play.
- Cards in Free Cell and Seahaven Towers can now be dragged to move them, rather than clicking on a card to select it and then clicking on the pile you want to move it to.
Cards 0.15, escaped 8.11.2004
- It's smaller and faster.
- Double Solitaire now uses two full packs of cards, rather than two packs less one set of aces. Consequently, the foundations are now built A,A,2,2...K,K
- The “intelligent” moving of cards when you right-click on them is nicer in some games. It's also more consistent, in that it won't move cards to the foundations any more (it used to do so in some game but not others). Use double-click to move cards to the foundations.
- It supports Firefox 1.0.
Cards 0.14, released 16.09.2004
- If you turn animation off then turning cards over is no longer animated, whereas in previous versions it only affected moving cards.
- There's now a Redo button on the toolbar, to go with Undo.
- You can undo (and redo) starting a new game, and restarting a game. This is mainly to make clicking the buttons for either of these actions by accident not be a problem, and is much nicer than the alternative solution of having pesky confirmation dialogs when starting a new game.
- When switching between Large and Small cards some cards (ones that had been turned face up, to be precise) used to remain too wide or too narrow. This has been fixed.
- FreeCell and Towers no longer use a popup dialogue to tell you that there aren't enough cells or spaces to carry out a move - instead they use a message similar to the one you get when winning, so you can click anywhere in the Cards window to dismiss it.
- TriPeaks now has scoring. It doesn't keep a running total through consecutive games yet.
- Autoplay has been rewritten for a number of games to make it faster.
Cards 0.13.2, released 30.07.2004
- Animation is no longer excruciatingly slow! (You still need a fast computer; this just refers to the oddity of Cards 0.12 and earlier running much better in Firebird 0.7 than Firefox 0.8.)
- Mod 3 works properly again
- When switching between games (e.g. between Klondike and Spider) the current game of each type is remembered
Cards 0.12, released 14.07.2004
Changes, in no particular order:
- Works with Firefox 0.9
- Somewhere between Firebird 0.7 and Firefox 0.8 (Mozilla 1.5 and Mozilla 1.7) the animation in Cards became unbearably slow, though I don't know why. I've rewritten the animation code for this version of Cards, and it is no longer quite so bad, though it still runs much better on Firebird 0.7.
- Right-clicking on a card now makes Cards move it to somewhere useful (hopefully to where you would otherwise have dragged the card). In previous versions of Cards middle-click was used for this purpose, but it's easier to click the right mouse button, and it wasn't being used for anything.
- Added the option to use smaller cards, useful for games that didn't fit on low resolution screens. Click the new Options button on the toolbar to access this. (Note: the Options button's menu also has an option to disable animation, but that doesn't work very well yet. I suggest you ignore it.)
- Got rid of the irritating message that popped up whenever you won a game. Now the message is shown in the main Cards window, and can be dismissed by clicking anywhere in the window.
- Changed most games so that clicking the Hint button will never suggest moving a card to an empty space.
- Made Mod 3's autoplay less eager and removed the autoplay in Golf because you sometimes ended up undoing moves it had made. Gypsy's autoplay has been tweaked so that it will put Aces of the same suit side by side (a killer feature, I'm sure you'll agree).
- Grandfather renamed to Russian Solitaire (the name used in PySol, though actually the rules are slightly relaxed in Cards).
- Added several new games, mostly copied from PySol. Not all have scoring yet.
- Black Widow - a Spider variant where any descending run of cards can me moved, not just those composed of only a single suit
- Grounds for Divorce - another Spider variant. Cards are dealt only to non-empty piles, runs wrap round from Ace to King (including when moving a run to the foundation piles)
- Fan
- Maze
- Montana (which is still rather buggy
- Pyramid
- Sanibel - like Yukon but with a different layout
- Seahaven Towers
- TriPeaks
- Wasp - cards can be moved as in Russian Solitaire, but (as in Spider) entire suits are moved to the foudation at once
- Whitehead - and run of cards all of the same suit can be moved, and can be placed onto any card one greater than and of the same colour as the bottom card in the run
- Bug: Mod 3 and Montana sometimes fail to acknowledge that you've won the game.
Cards 0.11.0, released 21.09.2003
Changes in this version:
- Golf game added (contributed by Derek Seabury)
- Mod 3 has autoplay (also thanks to Derek)
- Hints code all rewritten so that clicking Hint repeatedly will show different hints
- Animation and card dragging should be significantly faster on older computers. (Noticable improvement seen on a 350MHz K6-2).
- (Finally) Adds menu items to both Firebird and Mozilla 1.x to start the game - Tools > Cards for Firebird, Window > Cards for Mozilla 1.x. (This might not show up if installing over an older version. If so, try deleting the chrome.rdf file and overlayinfo/ directory in mozilla/chrome/. They'll be rebuilt when you next start Mozilla/Firebird).
- Install script has been rewritten to allow (optional) installation to profile rather than application chrome directory.
- Miscellaneous bug fixes.
Cards 0.10.3, released 31.05.2003
After installing type chrome://cards/content/ in the location bar to play.
New in this version:
- FreeCell added!
- Double Solitaire added! This is like Klondike solitaire, but using two packs, less one set of Aces. Foundation piles are built in the order A,2,2,3,3,4,4,...,Q,Q,K,K
- Problems with Simple Simon fixed!
- Bug in Spider Solitaire whereby double clicking any card would move it to the foundation piles fixed.
- SmartMove added to Regiment
Cards 0.9.0, released 29.04.2003
Changes:
- Cards will be piled up closer together if they would otherwise hang out of the bottom of the window. (Thanks to Neil Rashbrook for this.)
- Weirdness when dragging cards off the right hand side of the window fixed; as is the incredibly slow animation when cards pass below the bottom edge of the window. (Both fixes also thanks to Neil Rashbrook).
- Animation should be smoother having been extensively rewritten.