00:00:00
Card games are having a huge moment. Marvel
Snap is so big that everyone who plays it hates
00:00:05
it. Pokemon TCG Pocket is introducing
thousands of people to the card game,
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and raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Balatro, one of the best games I’ve ever played,
00:00:15
is hooking people and winning GOTY awards with
its crazy synergy and repeatable runs.
00:00:20
And this year, I got addicted to Solitaire.
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Why. Why. Why me? Why? WHY? Whyyyyyy
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I wish I could tell you I was
hooked on a weird Solitaire.
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Like, Regency Solitaire 2. Right up my
alley. I love historical romance! And,
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apparently, Solitaire! Or something
High Concept, like Mike Bithell’s The
00:00:38
Solitaire Conspiracy. It’s got espionage and
FMV cutscenes — nothing could be more me.
00:00:45
But no.
The game I got
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addicted to is a spin on Klondike, the most
famous — and basic — kind of Solitaire,
00:00:53
at least for kids who grew up using
Windows computers in the 90s.
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It’s called Sawayama Solitaire,
from developer Zachtronics.
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I’ve beaten… hang on a moment.
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934 GAMES!!!!
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— of Sawayama Solitaire
since I downloaded this app in late September.
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Some games feel impossible. Some are absurdly
easy. Most of them are a satisfying detangling of cards
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that has me immediately pressing that
new game button once I get the win.
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How is the most basic card game on
earth owning my ass like this?
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I think it’s because —
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[groovy synth music]
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“One of the embarrassments of applied
00:01:30
probability is that we cannot analyze
the original game of solitaire.”
00:01:34
“What’s the chance of winning, how to play
well, how do various changes of rules change
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the answers? Surely you say, the computer can
do this. Not at present, not even close.”
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That’s a quote from mathematician Persi Diaconis.
Professor Diaconis is one of the coolest people
00:01:52
I have ever heard of, and that is undoubtedly why
he did not reply to my interview request. He and
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fellow mathematician Dave Bayer are the people who
proved that it takes 7 riffle shuffles to truly
00:02:04
randomize a 52-card deck. He also ran away from
home when he was 14 to become a magician. I think
00:02:09
that was normal in 1960 but the point stands.
For Diaconis, card tricks were a slippery slope
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to an interest in probability, which led to a
sad, but inevitable fate: taking a degree in
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statistics and becoming a world-renowned
mathematician. You hate to see it.
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But it’s not hard to see the relationship
between magic… and math. Cards contain limitless
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possibilities. In fact, math tells us there are
more combinations of cards in a 52-card deck,
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than there are atoms on earth.
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Hey what?
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What does THAT mean?
But atoms are the little… the little ones.
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Writing for Quanta, Erica Klarreich asked
mathematician Ron Graham what that means in
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practice. He told her, “If everyone had been
shuffling decks of cards every second since
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the start of the Earth, you couldn’t touch 52
factorial,” the number of possible arrangements
00:02:58
of a 52-card deck. Klarreich goes on: “Any time
you shuffle a deck to the point of randomness,
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you have probably created an arrangement
that has never existed before.”
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So that’s nuts.
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Card math is also useful for
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game devs simulating randomness in prototypes —
even if they’re not making card-based games.
00:03:18
This randomness is probably one of reasons I
can’t stop playing Solitaire. No two decks of
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randomized cards are the same. No two
rounds of Solitaire are alike.
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It’s difficult for the human mind to
comprehend the mathematical probabilities
00:03:33
at play in card games. However: one thing
we can understand is why that gameplay can
00:03:38
keep us hooked. It’s called the jerk.
In a study from the Japan Advanced Institute
00:03:43
of Science and Technology, a team of
researchers described the jerk as a
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“sudden change in acceleration.” It’s mostly
used to describe physical sensations — your
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elevator dropping suddenly, a theme park
ride jolting you around a corner.
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But in games, it’s informational:
“the balance between certainty and
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uncertainty in reaching a goal.”
For example, when you start a round
00:04:05
of Overwatch you don’t have a lot of
information about the other players:
00:04:09
what characters they’ve chosen, where they’ll
attack from — whether you’re facing a bunch of
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randos, or a coordinated team. One second you’re
setting up — the next second Pharah is bombarding
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you with rockets. You have information. And
now you need to do something about it.
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That’s an example of the jerk. But it’s
certainly not relegated to action games.
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- Arvi Teikari: Puzzle games by default require
having some kind of an insight, like some kind of
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a realization. It can be possible to make that
realization in a puzzle into kind of an "aha" moment.
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- Simone: That’s Arvi Teikari, and
you’ll hear more from him later.
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Almost all card games tend to center around
these “aha” moments that come when you start
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to have a bigger picture of the deck.
Think, the next card being flipped in
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Texas Hold’Em. Filling your hand in Balatro,
and getting the exact card you need.
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There are other factors that contribute to
games being hooky: like how frequently you’re
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successful, and how difficult it is to win. Card
games tend to sit in a sweet spot on this scale.
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One of the researchers in the JAIST study,
Professor Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid, called them,
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“typical incomplete information games.”
“Short, repeatable rounds, chances,
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and strategizing make them among the most
entertaining, even addictive, games.”
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This study focused on Chinese card games like
Big Two, Winner, and FIGHTING THE LANDLORD,
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which sounds awesome. I’m not a scientist so take
my analysis with a grain of salt here, but I can
00:05:34
see how Solitaire fits this description.
It’s incredibly easy to repeat a round,
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and while you start with some information
with the cards face-up on the board,
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you’re constantly getting little hits of more. The
moments when you flip exactly the card you need,
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setting off a chain reaction of moves to
organize your board, feel so good.
00:05:55
But that feeling is not easy to manufacture.
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- Arvi Teikari: By default, I don't enjoy the idea of
when you deal a deck of cards to play a solitaire,
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you might get an impossible hand, and you can't know that.
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I'm Arvi Teikari, alias Hempuli,
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I'm a Finnish game dev based in Helsinki
and I've been making games since, basically
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since childhood, let's put it that way.
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- Simone: Arvi is best known as the developer
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behind Baba Is You, a fiendishly clever
block-pushing puzzler that netted a ton of
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accolades in 2019. Arvi brought that same humor
and puzzling sensibility to A Solitaire Mystery,
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his collection of Solitaire games that
came out on itch.io this year.
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AND HE’S THE PROBLEM. IT’S HIS FAULT
THAT I’M ADDICTED TO SOLITAIRE.
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Why! Why’d you do this to me?
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- Arvi Teikari: My main interest in making games is kind
of to surprise the player — to create
00:06:52
some reaction of amazement or
amusement or something. I played the
00:06:57
Zachtronics Solitaire collection and noticed
myself enjoying it and noticed myself getting
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ideas for, oh, what if I tried to design my
own solitaire where you had this kind of a
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gimmick in it or this kind of detail in it.
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- Simone: I was diligently doing my research
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before our interview and I saw that Arvi had
been inspired by Zachtronics Solitaire — a
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collection of all the solitaire minigames
that were originally tucked away in each of
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the developer’s past releases.
So I bought the Collection
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and I bought A Solitaire Mystery, and now I have a
mental health crisis. So thanks, Arvi.
00:07:35
As he mentioned, the solitaires of Mystery
all have a twist to them. In Chaotic Solitaire,
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every time you move a card, two random
cards swap spots. Or Tap Solitaire,
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where you can start temporary stacks by “tapping”
cards like in Magic: the Gathering. One of my
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favorite variants lets you tear cards in half.
And 52-Card Solitaire… drops all the cards
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in a pile and you have to pick them up in order.
This is one of the solitaires that demonstrates
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how challenging the math behind digital
solitaire can be for game developers.
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- Arvi Teikari: Something like Zachtronics
Solitaire Collection actually has systems
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in place to make sure that every game
you play is possible to be beaten.
00:08:19
- Simone: It does?
00:08:20
- Arvi Teikari: I don't know how to do that,
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but when trying to balance my Solitaire games, it
was interesting to notice that inevitably making
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a more difficult solitaire does usually
mean that I'm also making it more likely
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that the player can get stuck in it.
00:08:38
- Simone: The 52-Card pick-up solitaire is
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conceptually perfect. I love it and it’s so
funny. But boy is it difficult. Conversely,
00:08:48
you can go too far in the other direction.
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- Arvi Teikari: It feels more exciting to solve
00:08:52
a solitaire if you know that you might not have
solved it. There's currently one solitaire in
00:08:58
A Solitaire Mystery that people have reported
is always solvable no matter what. Like, you cannot
00:09:04
get truly stuck. It does feel like like a bug, even though
technically, like yeah — you can play it.
00:09:09
It's a working solitaire, you
can get to the end, but it lacks kind of
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that something. Tap Solitaire is
maybe the most solid of the solitaire in terms
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of being a traditional solitaire. You can play
it with a normal deck of cards, and the way it
00:09:27
works is something that you can very easily
simulate in the real world.
00:09:30
Royal Flush Solitaire is satisfying, because it feels like one of those, "what if this other thing, but recreated as a solitaire,"
00:09:38
that ended up working really well. Like, it's basically
making poker hands in a solitaire context. And I
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think it worked really nicely and people have
commented that they like it quite a bunch.
00:09:50
- Simone: So many kinds of solitaire.
Depending on your definition of solitaire,
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this year’s biggest game is a solitaire. Balatro
has sold millions of copies, and made millions of
00:10:01
dollars, and that was before it came out on mobile.
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It’s just a single-player card game
— but it’s got incredible complexity because
00:10:07
of the different ways the cards can interact with
each other, and decks can be built.
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52 factorial, baybeeeeee!!!
00:10:14
Probably even more, 'cause
there's jokers and tarot cards.
00:10:16
One of the interesting things about Balatro is
that while it’s widely described as a poker game,
00:10:21
its gameplay owes more to Big Two — one of the
Chinese card games mentioned in that study.
00:10:26
Any card game can become a new,
even more addictive one with just
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a twist — the possibilities might be infinite,
and that’s something we simply don’t know about
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playing cards.
But also.
00:10:38
[groovy 80s synth music]
00:10:41
We don’t know where playing cards came from.
One of the things that makes games a tricky area
00:10:45
of study is that up until very recently, they’ve
been physical objects that get a lot of use. Dice
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and game boards are sturdier and might last the
test of time… cards are not. Think of how grubby
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your most-used deck of playing cards is. You
might not think twice about tossing it for a
00:11:02
new one — and future historians are wailing and
gnashing their teeth about it, because oh my god,
00:11:07
an extant 2024 card deck, depicting popular
figure Shrek and his companion, the Donkey?? What
00:11:13
an important and unique historical object!
Often the game pieces that get preserved are the ones
00:11:19
that are fancier and decorative. Or ones that were
owned by notable people, whose random toy might
00:11:25
be considered historically significant.
In her book Gaming the Stage: Playable Media
00:11:29
and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Gina
Bloom writes that playing cards were mentioned in
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Spanish antigaming regulations as far back as
1332, but the oldest preserved, complete set,
00:11:40
where no cards are missing from the deck,
is this one from the Netherlands in the
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late 1470s. The Met says the cards were
“hardly used, if at all. It is possible
00:11:49
that they were conceived as a collector’s
curiosity rather than a deck for play.”
00:11:53
A tradition we should uphold today.
BUT! More important for understanding card
00:11:58
evolution, is this deck from the Mamluk
sultanate in what is now Egypt. Even though
00:12:03
it’s younger than the Dutch deck — it dates
from around 1500 — this Mamluk deck contains
00:12:08
some potential clues towards the origins of
playing cards. As Tor Gjerde points out on this
00:12:13
immaculate personal website, these cards mark
the high card of each suit, similar to Chinese
00:12:19
money-cards and Persian ganjifa cards.
Andrew Lo’s “The Game of Leaves: An Inquiry
00:12:24
into the Origin of Chinese Playing Cards” puts
1294 in China as the earliest reliable date that
00:12:30
the existence of cards has been recorded, ever,
in all of history, but we don’t have anything
00:12:35
left of the cards themselves. Some researchers
point to very old Chinese tile-based games like
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dominos and mahjong as precursors: carved tiles
are a hop skip and a jump to cards once we get
00:12:46
over ourselves and invent paper already.
00:12:48
(actually people probably made cards from like,
00:12:50
wood and leaves and cloth before they
jumped to paper but. ANYWAY.)
00:12:54
There are LOTS of different kinds of cards in
China: They’ve got domino, they’ve got chess,
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they’ve got money, they’ve got number! The
money cards are the ones that historians point
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to as potential precursors for our modern
playing cards, since money cards eventually
00:13:09
developed four recognizable suits.
On the other hand, ganjifa cards came from
00:13:14
what was then Persia, and are recorded as far
back as the 14th century. They originally had
00:13:19
a lot more suits, and fancy versions of these
cards were popular in the Mughal courts of
00:13:24
India during the 1500s, where they would’ve
been made of shells or ivory. Which is so
00:13:29
cool. They must’ve made really good noises.
Whether or not the ganjifa
00:13:32
cards were based on Chinese cards originally,
cards came to Europe through the Middle East.
00:13:37
Throughout the uhhh most of time until
quite recently, Christian Europe and the
00:13:41
Islamic Middle East and North Africa were
passing a conquering baton back and forth
00:13:46
across the Mediterranean. One day the Franks are
sacking Tripoli, the next day the Saracens are
00:13:50
conquering Sicily, it’s a whole thing. I know I’m
oversimplifying it please don’t yell at me.
00:13:55
Obviously this led to a lot of bloodshed,
but it also led to a beautiful sharing of
00:14:00
knowledge. As you probably know, chess
came to Europe via Persia and Arabia,
00:14:05
and so did um…
00:14:07
Huh, MATH.
00:14:08
So too playing cards.
The first cards that came to Europe weren’t
00:14:12
uniform like our now-standard deck. As playing
cards traveled north, European countries developed
00:14:17
custom suits, and decks with varied numbers
of cards. This part is actually kind of funny,
00:14:22
like they spread from Italy to Germany, and
Germany was like “oh no icky we want our own.”
00:14:27
Thanks to an already robust printing industry,
Germany became the hub of playing card production
00:14:32
in Europe during the 14th century.
But then!!!!!
00:14:36
The French.
00:14:36
In an ancient display of branding prowess, the
French developed the card iconography that has
00:14:42
taken over the world. They standardized
the suits, and simplified the colors,
00:14:47
paring the designs down to red and black,
which made printing them much easier.
00:14:52
Due to their simplicity and the ease of
production, French playing cards took over
00:14:56
Europe. And much like how the original playing
cards came West through commerce and colonization,
00:15:03
French playing cards went back East — through
commerce, and colonization. For example,
00:15:08
Portuguese sailors took them to Japan in the
16th century before Japan went into isolation.
00:15:12
And developed its own dope-ass playing cards.
00:15:15
Now, maybe you’re wondering
"WHERE DOES THE UNITED
00:15:17
STATES COME INTO THIS,” I’M AMERICAn.
00:15:20
We invented jokers.
00:15:23
The one you take OUT of the deck.
00:15:25
No matter where you place the origin of
00:15:27
playing cards geographically, or how much you
understand about their weird math, one thing is
00:15:32
true: they’ve been around a long-ass time.
And that adds a dimension to the question of why
00:15:37
playing cards are so compelling.
00:15:39
[mysterious synth music]
00:15:41
For all of my lifetime, the Bicycle
playing card deck has been
00:15:45
functionally unchanged. For 400-something
years, the four suits and the 52-card deck
00:15:51
have only become more globally ubiquitous.
All those popular Chinese card games that
00:15:56
were part of the study on addictiveness
— they’re played with that deck.
00:16:00
As Gina Bloom wrote:
“We can know something of
00:16:03
what it felt like for early moderns to play or
watch others play these games because we use
00:16:08
essentially the same gaming materials they did.”
00:16:11
- Arvi Teikari: It mostly comes down to
00:16:15
playing cards being something that almost all
people are kind of intimately familiar with.
00:16:22
They are also fairly flexible, they have a surprising number of both
mathematical and otherwise kind of utilities.
00:16:33
But I would maybe say that that simplicity is — or
not simplicity — but the familiarity would be the
00:16:39
kind of major thing that might draw people.
00:16:43
- Simone: I grew up playing Spoons, and War,
00:16:45
and Speed, and Go Fish, and Bullshit, and
yes, Solitaire with these cards. Back in the
00:16:52
16th century they were playing Maw, and Romestecq,
and Noddy, and Gleek. Really, it was called Gleek.
00:17:00
I guess it still is.
00:17:01
The universality of playing
00:17:02
cards has resulted in a seemingly limitless number
of games to play. But we’re all using — more or
00:17:09
less — the same deck. That’s kind of magic.
One quality shared by most of the card-based
00:17:14
video games that I’ve played, is that they
evoke the physical act of touching cards.
00:17:19
- Arvi Teikari: When it comes to cards, digital
implementations of cards games, and video games
00:17:25
that use card games, can manage to recreate
some of the tactile feel or the like, satisfyingness
00:17:32
of playing cards that exist in real world.
00:17:36
- Simone: You can’t make a digital card
game without good card sounds.
00:17:40
[Balatro cards fwipping and plunking]
00:17:43
Or good card feel.
The intimacy and familiarity is kind of a cheat
00:17:47
code. You’re already connected to the game
— because you’re connected to the cards.
00:17:53
- Arvi Teikari: I've seen people comment on A
Solitaire Mystery of like, yeah, the sounds
00:17:57
that play when you move the cards around
are satisfying. So they get some of that
00:18:00
kind of enjoyment of moving cards around.
00:18:03
- Simone: One of the things that tickled me most
00:18:04
about A Solitaire Mystery is that Arvi
indicates whether or not each solitaire
00:18:08
can be played with a physical deck. For
a lot of them… yeah, it’s possible! You
00:18:13
might be tearing your cards in half and you can
really only do that once but… it is possible!
00:18:17
Playing cards are associated with everything
from clownery, to gambling, to magic,
00:18:22
to childhood play. So, one thing we do understand
about them… is that their appeal is infinite.
00:18:29
[zippy synth music]
00:18:32
- Simone: I feel like I'm doing weird shit with my hands.
Do YOU feel like I'm doing weird shit with my hands?
00:18:36
HAAAAAAAAAAAH!
00:18:37
It's disgusting, I have carpal tunnel...
00:18:39
... from Solitaire!!
00:18:41
- Pat (very low, off-screen): Card-pull tunnel.
00:18:43
- Simone [falsetto]: nya ba ba ba haaaah! HOO HOO!
00:18:46
[accidentally speaking weird high] So!
00:18:47
One thing we —
00:18:47
[mockingly tiny mouse voice] So! So!
00:18:49
Playing — big fart noise?? Not me.
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