Shamrocks Instructions

Overview

At first glance, victory in Shamrocks solitaire appears easy to attain. The layout contains 18 building stacks, which accept cards in both ascending and descending rank regardless of suit. However, a stack can accept no more than 3 cards and removing all cards from a stack takes it out of play, which makes the game considerably more challenging.

Layout

There are two types of stacks on the screen

Building Stacks All stacks in the layout except for those in the leftmost column are building stacks. A building stack accepts cards in both ascending and descending rank. No cards can be added to a building stack if the stack contains 3 or 0 cards. The stacks are arranged so that a king will be below all cards with the same suit as the king.
Suit Stacks The suit stacks are located in the left column of the layout and are initially empty. They accept cards of the same suit in ascending order.

Moving Cards

To move a card, click on the card (which will highlight it) and then click on the destination. Only cards at the top of a building stack can be moved. The following are valid moves:

An ace can be moved to its suit stack. (This will usually be done automatically.)
A card can be moved to its corresponding suit stack if the rank of the card at the top of that stack is one less than the card's rank (Kings have a rank of 13, queens 12, jacks 11 and an ace has a rank of 1).
A card can be moved to an occupied building stack if the stack contains less than three cards and the rank of the card is one more or one less than the card currently at the top of the stack. The suit of the card is irrelevant. No cards can be added to an empty stack.

A card will be automatically moved to the suit stacks from the the building stacks if the cards which might be placed on top of it are already in the suit stacks. Cards at the bottom of a stack will not be moved automatically to prevent the undesired removal of the stack. Clicking undo will retract an automatic move.

Tips

Do not remove the final card from a building stack, making the stack unusable, unless you are sure the stack is no longer needed.
Try to arrange the stacks in descending rank if possible because it will make moving cards to the suit stacks much easier.

Buttons

Clicking on these buttons will perform the following actions:

New Game

Begin a new game after shuffling the deck

Restart

Return to the original state of the current game

Undo

Return to the condition before the previous move was made

Options

Bring up a window with the following options:

Automatic card moving: When this box is set (which is the default), a card atop a stack will be moved to its suit stack automatically if there are no cards available which might be placed on top of it.

History

Version 1.01 (2000/02/10): Fixed bug which prevented placing cards on an ace in a building stack
Version 1.0 (2000/02/08): First public release

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