About Cogito Solitaire

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The Game

The game starts with a shuffled deck laid out in four horizontal rows. The aces are removed from the deck and there are empty spaces where the aces would have been.

The goal of the game is to sort the cards in the least amount of rounds possible, starting with the king at the leftmost position, than the queen, jack, 10 and so on. All the cards in each horizontal row must have the same suit.

Rules

How do cards change position? Consider an empty space. The card immediately to the left of the empty space determines what card can be moved to it. The card that will occupy the space must be of the same suit and ranked immediately below the card to the left of the space. To select a card you want to move you touch it. The card will be rendered with a different color. To move the card you selected to an empty space you touch the empty space.

When the card to the left of a space is a 2, that space has become useless. When this happens for all the four spaces, no further movement is possible and you have to start a new round to continue. When a new round starts, all the cards that are not on the definitively sorted position are removed and placed again after shuffling. What are the cards considered in a definitively sorted position: they must have to its left a card of the same suit, ranked immediately higher and if you proceed to the left, the sequence must end in a king in the leftmost position.

Possible Startegies

How do you choose the cards to move? You can start placing the king in the leftmost position and proceed from there. You can check what are the cards currently placed in the leftmost position and imagine how would they get out of there. Let us say you have a queen of hearts at the first position of the deck (top left). It will only leave that position if you can move it to the right of the king of hearts. Let us imagine we have a queen of spades occupying the position to the right of the king of hearts. You can move it if there is an empty space to the right of the position of the king of spades. You proceed with this reasoning until you come to an actual empty space. Then you can execute the play.

Another way you can think: you choose one empty space (that hasn't a 2 at its left) and imagine you move the card you can put in there: same suit, immediately below. The moved card will open another empty slot. Then you think what happens if you place the possible card in that slot and son on. If the sequence of moves brings you to free one card at the leftmost unsorted position of a row, it is probably a good move and you can execute the play.

Good playing!