Solitaire and making every minute count in the new year

If I’m going to relax and waste time, I’m going to do it playing Solitaire on my tablet. But even then, I set the controls so I’m not totally wasting my time. I have my Solitaire program set so that every hand that is dealt is a winning hand. Then if I don’t win, I know it’s my fault. Sometimes I will play a hand again, or hit the hint button, but most times I just acknowledge failure and move on to a new game.

I have fun playing the game so most times I don’t even look at the score. Because you have some players who, I think, memorize a game so they can play as fast as possible to get a high score. Here’s what happened this morning as I was actually playing Solitaire for the purpose of research for my column. Yes, I wasn’t wasting time for a change.

Here was my score for a game: 132 moves to win took me four minutes and 35 seconds to do and earned me a measly 2,993 points. I have had a lot better games, but not today. And a very few times, I have gotten the least amount of moves for a game but I’m never going to beat the fastest time.

Now here is the best score for the same game I played: 109 moves to win in 31 seconds and a top score of 22,974. Do you think they considered any of those moves before they made them? Nope, they just wanted to get their name on the list of top ten players. The game will show you how to win if you push the right button. This is why I don’t care about my score.

Another thing I don’t care for in the game is the daily goals they come up with for you. They are ridiculous and probably something that someone came up with for perceived “added value” without adding anything of substance. But you can win extra points if you accomplish these goals, I haven’t found that to be useful for anything.

Here are a few of the goals I achieved for today without trying at all. I don’t know anyone who would even try to keep track of these goals. They were: win two deals, have one column cleared before cycling the stockpile and then win any deal, and make a run of eight cards within 80 moves and then win any deal.

I wrote the goals down because I was doing research and then promptly forgot about them. A few games later the program congratulated me for reaching these goals. I earned an extra 300 points but I’m not sure how that benefited me. I just want to play.

The game tries to keep you playing all the time and it has something called the daily challenge. I used to do the daily challenge but got a little obsessed with it. Sometimes it was easy to figure out. There were only one or two daily challenges that I could never figure out, but I wasted a lot of time trying. I fixed that though; I quit playing the daily challenge.

So, if you are going to set some goals for the new year, be sure to make it something substantial, not like these crazy Solitaire goals.

I’m not setting any goals though. I just try to do my best every day. If I think of a good goal during the year, I’ll set one, but I don’t worry about New Year’s resolutions. There are too many days of cold weather left to challenge us this winter. Let’s not worry about setting some grand life-changing goals now that – be real – won’t make it to February. We can just wait.