Cruel (solitaire)

Cruel is a solitaire card game based on Perseverance. Cruel became popular when it was published as video game for Microsoft Windows by Microsoft in 1990 as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.0.[1][2][3] Cruel has since been remade for other platforms by several vendors.

Cruel starting position

Play

Cruel uses a standard deck of 52 playing cards. The aces are placed face up to act as the foundations, upon which the suits will be built in sequence. The rest of the cards are shuffled and then dealt in 12 tableau piles, each with four cards.

The aim of the game is to place all the cards on the foundation piles, ordered from ace to king, using an unlimited number of moves.

For each move the player chooses any one of the top (exposed) cards from a tableau pile and places it either:

• on another tableau pile – on the next higher value in the same suit (for example, the 5♣ can be placed on the 6♣), or
• on a foundation pile – on the next lower value in the same suit (for example, the 8♣ can be placed on the 7♣).

Only one card may be moved at a time.

At any time the player may have the tableau piles re-dealt, whereby they are collected together in sequence (from left to right, row by row) without shuffling and dealt in piles of four. This is activated by the "Deal" button. In some third-party implementations of the game, the tableau piles are re-dealt differently by starting at the last pile putting on the top of its left-hand neighbor and so on (i.e. right to left, row by row upwards). This implementation makes the game less winnable than Microsoft's implementation.[4]

The game is won when all the cards are on the foundation piles. The game is lost if no more moves are possible even if re-dealt.

References

1. Schultz, Greg. "Inside Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1". TechRepublic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 17 March 2014.
2. Lauppert, Theodor. "The Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows". Theodor Lauppert. Retrieved 17 March 2014.
3. Wood, Tina. "The History of Microsoft - 1990". Channel 9. Microsoft Corp. Retrieved 17 March 2014.
4. Wolter, Jan (January 15, 2014). "Experimental Analysis of Cruel Solitaire". politaire.com. Retrieved 2020-04-23.; cites an earlier version of this article.

See also

• List of solitaires
• Glossary of solitaire