Brain training with puzzles.

For many years, approximately 20 years, I spent some time every day playing a mobile puzzle game.
When I tell you what it was, you’ll say “how old fashioned” or “that’s not a mobile game” .

Hear me out !

The games are Solitaire card games.
I say games as there are many versions.
The specific games I played were :

• ️Klondike is the traditional Solitaire game most people are familiar with.
• Freecell is the only one of the five different games where you see all your cards from the start. You have to manoeuvre each one to create alternating suits by utilizing the empty cells and temporarily moving cards in and out of the empty cells to clear the deck.
• Spider is just like a spiders web, different cards come in to play in layers and you must create lines of suits to clear the deck.
• Pyramid is strategical. A Pyramid of cards are on display and you have cards in your hand. You must clear the Pyramid by planning which cards from your hand to play, when and in which order. You control the flow from your hand and their insertion into the the Pyramid.
• TriPeaks as you flip the cards in your deck you must create numerical lines to delete those cards as they appear, unfold and present themselves from the hidden 3 mountain peaks.

These Solitaire card games are good for:

• Strategy – specifically Pyramid
• Memory – what cards you have already played and what you have in your hand.
• Pattern recognition
• Speed for those games that set a time limit, are great for eye, hand, memory coordination. I find TriPeaks is particularly good for this.
• Reverse engineering – What ?  I hear you saying.
  • If you finish a game without winning, you can go back step by step by using the back button 🔙 and try to figure out where you made a wrong turn or identify where there are multiple paths to try next time.

Remember you are playing against yourself, the aim is to achieve the task set or clear the deck, any way feasible .
They’re beneficial for building your memory and cognitive skills, especially figuring out pathways.  These games are less about reaction and more about strategy and the results of your solitary choices and actions.
The cards in their different formats can be seen/perceived as groups or individuals in different positions and on different pathways. You have to manoeuvre them and yourself in order to make your way through the collective to reach the end or goal.

I know, I know, there’s no shooting or racing, I do like driving or flying games too, on larger screens though, which do justice to all the graphics.
But if you think about the baseline of your high fidelity epic games, you will see principles of patterns, multiple turning points or choices that all have different outcomes.

I have played many,  many different Solitaire developers packs, free, paid and subscription based.

The larger companies have daily challenges and tournaments with special events , whereby you still play against yourself but also against thousands of other people’s scores.

The tournaments are great because it makes a solitaire game more social and although you should always compete against yourself, there is the added interest and goal of getting a ranking or place on the leader board.

Our world is a puzzle.
A puzzle that has a lot of possible outcomes, but no definite answer.
Micro puzzles within an enormous puzzle.
The enormous puzzle consists of constantly changing, adapting micro puzzles.
If everything is constantly changing, there can never be just one permanent answer for our enormous puzzle.
Everything in our world is temporary within a specific time and place.

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Video Summary

Sound On 🔊

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