Steam Vent Solitaire

01 / The rules

Legal moves, all of them

• Columns build down in alternating colours. A red six goes onto a black seven. You can pick up a whole run at once as long as it follows that pattern.
• Only a king starts an empty column. Kings, or a run led by a king.
• Vents build up in a single suit from the ace. The first ace to arrive claims an empty vent, then it wants the two, three and so on in that suit.
• Cards in a vent stay there. Unlike some versions, you cannot pull a card back down into the columns — the coins have already been paid.
• Three cards turn at a time. Only the top one is playable. When the draw pile empties, tap it once more to turn the waste back over. There is no limit on passes.
• Face-down cards flip themselves as soon as the card covering them moves away.

There is no undo, so a move is a move. That is deliberate: it keeps the coin payouts honest, since a card that reaches a vent has already been paid for.

What a layout pays

Your stake comes out of the balance when the cards are dealt. Each card that lands in a vent pays back a tenth of that stake immediately, so a 100-coin layout returns 10 coins a card. Clear all 52 and you also collect a completion bonus equal to your stake — 620 coins back from a 100-coin deal.

Get partway and the coins you have already collected are yours. Thirty cards up the vents on a 100-coin stake means 300 coins back, which is a profit even though the layout beat you.

Some layouts cannot be won

That is true of Klondike everywhere and is not a quirk of this version. Some deals have no solution at all, and plenty more are only solvable if you happen to make the right choice at a point where the information is hidden from you. Computer analysis of Klondike has shown that a large majority of deals can be solved when every card is known in advance, which tells you how much of the difficulty is simply not being able to see. If a layout stalls, deal another one — the shuffle owes you nothing and the stake is worthless anyway.

Mouse, finger and keyboard

Drag a card or a run with a mouse or a finger, or tap the card and then its destination if that suits you better. Double-tap sends a card straight to the right vent when one will take it. Every card is a real button, so Tab moves between them, Enter or Space picks up and drops, and Escape puts a card back down.