7 New Games! Plus other improvements

It's been a while since I've made my last blog post.
These past two months have been very busy for me in real life and I haven't had much time to spend working on improving World of Solitaire.

Things have quieted down recently, and that has allowed me to add some new games and features to the site.

7 new games are now available!
These include:

• Royal Parade
• Easthaven
• Easthaven (Kings Only)
• Double Easthaven
• Double Easthaven (Kings Only)
• Triple Easthaven
• Triple Easthaven (Kings Only)

I have also enhanced the 'Select Game' browser.
You'll notice on the left a new folder: 'Games - Recently Played'
This folder will show your last 5 played games this session.

In addition, due to the growing list of games, I have reorganized the folders a bit.
The Alphabetical folder is now lower in the list in order to reveal that additional categories are available from which to browse for games.

If you take a look at the 'Games - by Time' and 'Games - by Difficulty' folders you'll notice they are have descriptions now as to what the different levels mean.
I've also went through all the games and corrected their Time and Difficulty information to more closely match the statistical information. I believe the information is MUCH more accurate now.

It's been a lot of fun seeing World of Solitaire grow over the past few months.

I want to thank everyone who has sent me an e-mail or made a comment on my blog.
Your input is greatly appreciated :)

I hope everyone continues to enjoy playing :)

New Records! New 'Browse Decks' feature!

At some time over the weekend a World of Solitaire player made the 1 BILLIONTH move!
Also on Sunday at 2:51 PM, Anonymous User #762,803 won a game of Klondike (Turn Three) marking the 2 millionth won hand!

This weekend I introduced a few changes to the World of Solitaire interface.
First notice that the 'Decks' menu now only shows 4 decks instead of 8.
There is a new option in the 'Decks' menu to 'See More Decks...'
Clicking on the 'See More Decks...' menu brings up a Decks window that lets you browse all the available decks in a much more visual manner. You can examine all the different cards that make up the deck seeing them in much greater quality than before.

If your wondering why I did this... you'll have to wait a while longer. I have a new feature coming to this 'Decks' window that I'm really excited about.

For those of you out there using larger computer screens, I've added larger sized deck images for 7 of the 8 decks on the site. This means playing with a bigger screen should result in a much nicer looking experience.

I really hope everyone continues to enjoy playing at World of Solitaire :)

Three new games! Deck Usage Statistics

Hello everyone!

I've just finished implementing three new games:

• Eight Off
• Baker's Game
• Baker's Game (Kings Only)

They are similar to FreeCell. Eight Off is one of the more popular Solitaire games, I hadn't played it until today, but I find it a lot of fun!

I was thinking about decks lately, and decided to put together a pie chart showing deck usage statistics:




As you can see, the default deck for the site, Paris is the most popular.
Seeing the 'Anglo American' deck be in second place really surprised me! I really figured I'd see Ornamental higher.

I'm working on some new features for the site that I'm pretty sure you are all going to love :)
I hope it doesn't take too long. I'll of course make a blog post once I've put the new feature live on the site :)

Until next time... thanks for playing and I hope you all continue to have fun :)

6 New Games! Other Improvements

I wanted to let everyone know that since my last post just a few days ago, I've added 6 new games to the site.
They include:

Cruel (Traditional Redeal)
Double Klondike (Turn One)
Double Klondike (Turn Three)
Triple Klondike (Turn One)
Triple Klondike (Turn Three)

The new Klondike's are basically just 2 and 3 deck variants of the regular Klondike.
The 'Traditional Redeal' version of Cruel redeals cards the same way the original Windows 3.1 game redealt cards. It's a lot easier to play than the regular 'Cruel' version which is a more modern redeal approach similar to the way several more recent Solitaire games implement it.

I've also shortened the updates for Global Statistics and Leaderboards to every 5 minutes instead of every 10.
Several minor bugs have also been fixed such as the leaderboards not showing all of the top 10 and the timeline graphs looking inaccurate.

We are getting close to having our 20 millionth hand dealt!
Also each day we get closer to having our 1 BILLIONTH move made!

I want to thank everyone that I received e-mails from. Whether it be bug reports, suggestions or just 'job well done' e-mails, I really love getting them. It helps to keep me going :)

I hope everyone continues to have fun playing :)

New Game - Cruel, Statistics Improvements

It's been about a month or so since my last post, thought I'd give a quick update.

I fixed the statistics code that was responsible for showing up to date Timeline graphs of hands played. There should be up to date timeline graphs now for all the games.

Also, I've added a new game, Cruel.

A user requested this and so I went ahead and added it in this past weekend.

If anyone would like to request a Solitaire game be added, just comment here or e-mail me: robert@cosmicrealms.com

The site continues to do well. More and more people are coming each and every day.

I really hope everyone out there is having fun playing :)

Leaderboard Improvements

I wanted to let everyone know about some improvements I've just made to the Leaderboards.

Instead of showing multiple users in the Fewest Moves and Shortest Time To Win boards, it now only shows one entry for a user per board, their best entry. This allows lots of other people to compete for placement on the boards.

All global statistics, including the Leaderboards, now update every 10 minutes!
I think everyone agrees that this is much better than the previous 6 hour update delay.

I'm still working on the Timeline graphs. Those are currently are not going to show up at all or are out of date. I'll let you all know once I've fixed those as well (those may take a bit more time to correct).

That's it for this update... I hope you are all having fun :)

Undo/Auto Play Changes, Speed Improvements

I wanted to let everyone know that I have changed the way Auto Play and Undo are handled.

Now when you Undo, it will just undo 1 move. The last move made.
If that move was one done by the Auto Play system, then Auto Play will not make another move until after you've made a move.

This means if Auto Play makes three moves in a row, you can now undo just one or two of them and choose to play the card you undid too differently.

This was requested by many players and I agree that it's much better this way.

Also I've been receiving reports that pulling up the statistics is a lot slower now a days.
I've spent most of the night coding a new system for storing statistics on the server, one that makes retrieving some of the statistics MUCH faster.

So you should now see the 'Most Played Games' pie and the 'Stats' section come up really really quickly.

The 'Timeline' statistic has been disabled until I have a chance to improve it's speed. It may be disabled for a few days.

I intended to do some other changes too but didn't have time. I'm sure I'll be in the mood to do more changes in the future so keep your eyes open :)

I hope you all are enjoying the games!

Four New Games!

I've just implemented four new games!

La Belle Lucie
Three Shuffles and a Draw
Trefoil
Trefoil and a Draw

They are basically the same game with just slight variations in rules. Enjoy!

10 Million Hands! New Games! Feature Enhancements!

On Tuesday January 22nd at 1:54PM, Anonymous User #488,131 dealt World of Solitaire's 10 MILLIONTH hand of Solitaire!

I want to thank everyone for playing! I really hope that you are all enjoying the games!

As a celebration, I have made some improvements!

1) Two new games!
Tri Peaks and Tri Peaks Strict. These were requested by a player and I'm pleased to add them to the site. Keep those game requests coming, you can e-mail them to me at robert@cosmicrealms.com

2) The Undo Move feature have been enhanced!
A common annoyance was after the computer auto played a card, when you chose 'Undo Move' it undid the move the computer made, but then the computer went and made the same exact move again. This made it impossible to undo further back in time unless you clicked Undo Move several times in rapid succession or you turned Auto Play off.

Now whenever you Undo a move, it will always Undo the last move that YOU made.
That means if the computer just finished automatically making 3 moves, when you Undo those three moves and the move that you made before that will be undone. This should make the Undo Move feature much more useful.

3) The Auto Play feature has been enhanced!
Auto Play used to automatically make moves at the start of the game, which resulted in the Timer to start before you even got a chance to look at the board.
Now Auto Play will not make any moves until you've made the first move. This should give you the ability to look over the board first and plan any strategy.

4) Sultan now uses the Auto Play feature!

5) Golf and Golf Relaxed no longer require you to clear the Stock in order to win.
Just clearing the Tableau spots is now enough to win (since clearing the Stock is trivial).


In addition to the five items mentioned above, I've also cleaned up some of the statistic graphs in order to be read more easily.

I also fixed a bug a few days ago that caused Spider to sometimes be un-winnable due to having some 'extra cards' left at the end. This bug caused many headaches for many players and it was a difficult one to solve. I'm fairly confident it's squashed now :)

Each and every day brings more and more players to World of Solitaire.

I hope you all continue to enjoy playing!

New Help Feature

Just wanted to pop in and talk a bit about the new help feature I just implemented.

In the top right corner of the game you'll see a big blue question mark.
If you click on this question mark, the rules for the game you are currently playing will appear on the right hand side of the screen.
You can click on the question mark again to make the rules go away again.

You can resize the rules box by grabbing the left hand side of the rules box (the vertical grey bar) and dragging left or right.

You'll also notice in the rules little magnifying glasses. If you move your mouse over them, the game will highlight the areas that correspond to that section of the rules.

I hope that this new feature will make it easier for everyone to learn the different versions of Solitaire on the site.

Enjoy playing everyone :)

New Year, New Server, New Deck

So as we start to creep into 2008 World of Solitaire has gone through some new changes.

Firstly, the server move is complete and we are now on new hardware. This means that statistics are back to being calculated every 3 hours rather than once a day. The new server should also allow growth to continue at the rate that it has been over the past several months.

Secondly, I've done some cleanup of the statistics removing entries that were impossible to achieve. Based on user feedback and what I see I think there are still some bugs in this area and I'll be taking further looks at this in the future to try and correct these issues.

Lastly, I have added a new deck! It's basically the same as the 'Oxygen' deck except with a white background and slightly easier to look at coloring. I hope you all enjoy it.

What is in store for World of Solitaire for 2008?
I plan to continue to add new game types. It would be great if I could double the number of games available before the end of the year.
I also plan to re-write the instructions for each game to be more clear and consistent. Maybe even go so far as to have an animated tutorial of sorts to show how the games are played.

I want to thank you all for playing. I'm really pleased with how many people are enjoying the site and hope that you continue to have fun in 2008!

Happy new year everyone :)

Speed and Statistics

As World of Solitaire has continued to grow over these past few months, stress on the server has also been increasing.
Some of you may have noticed small glitches where the delay to login may be very long, or the site in general will take some time to first load.
Also statistics have been slower to generate. Global Statistics were once calculated live, then they were calculated every 3 hours and just recently it has been changed to once a day updates.

It should come as good news to everyone that a new, faster server is on the way.
I hope that within a few days I'll have World of Solitaire moved over to the new server which should solve most of the issues I described above.

In addition if you've seen the Leaderboard, there are some scores that seem... well... not quite possible.
Thanks to user e-mails and further investigation it does appear that some scores are simply impossible to be legit, such as solving Klondike in under 52 moves.
Along with the new server will also come a clean-up in any erroneous statistics.

This means the leader board will change and you may find yourself ranked higher than before.

Thank you all for playing World of Solitaire. I really hope that you are having a good time playing.
If anyone has any comments, suggestions or new solitaire game requests, please feel free to either comment on this post or e-mail me at: robert@cosmicrealms.com

Thanks again :)