More solitaire variations not less please [Re: Gnome Games 2.17.90]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, Jason D. Clinton wrote:

> Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2007 03:23:24 -0600
> From: Jason D. Clinton <me jasonclinton com>
> To: games-list <games-list gnome org>, gnome-announce-list gnome org
> Subject: Gnome Games 2.17.90
>
> gnome-games 2.17.90
> ====================
> This is the first beta release in the Gnome 2.18 release series. Few
> large changes have been made since 2.17.5. Most of the changes are
> spit-and-polish making our two newly-included games even better for
> their first stable releases. Here are some of the changes that have been
> included in the past three weeks:

>         * Aisleriot   : Remove options from Spiderette and Will O The
> 	                Wisp, #398192

I do not think that change is a good idea (or more accurately the previous
change that prompted this one).  I hope you will you wont make a final
decision about keeping it and consider reverting before the next stable
release.

I wouldn't describe merging together different games quite as innocuously
as "Remove options" because the shuffle options make for a whole different
game, this is removing games.

Changing the intial deck really does makes it quite a different game and a
seperate scoreboard is needed.

If you are really sure you want to make these changes it would be better
to make even more changes and merge other very similiar games but again I
dont think this is quite the right approach.  Having lots of games which
only vary in small ways is actually a good thing, the bad thing is quite
thing is how little code reuse goes on behind the scenes.

The Spider variations just happen to be an easy target to identify since
they are more recent games and actually make the effort to share and reuse
chunks of code.  There is a lot of code and documentation redundancy that
could be avoided but reducing the number of available games isn't really
much benefit to players.  (A better glossary of terms, and frequently
hyperlinking to that glossary would allow the individual game pages to be
slimmed down substantially).  The annoyances Aaron mentioned in bug 393709
are quite significant.

Options are best reserved not for changes to the intial setup but rather
changes like "King Only" (allowing users to put only a King in a blank
slot) which users might decide to turn off later when the game gets too
hard (but lots of games are intentionally difficult and this wouldn't be
an option for all games).  If more games included Autoplay you would need
an option to disable it in some games or an option allowing players to
back cards out from the foundations but again some games would
disallow this option permanently.  If you have access to a Windows
computer I would strongly encourage you to checkout Pretty Good Solitaire
(goodsol) which does a lot of things rather well.  http://goodsol.com

I do hope you will reconsider these changes very carefully.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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