How to play PySol

Mouse Usage

Left mouse button:

• Drag cards around
• Click on the Talon to deal new cards

Right mouse button (or double-click the left button):

• Drop cards to the Foundations
• Quick play (if enabled)

Middle mouse button (or Ctrl-click the right button):

• View partially overlapped cards

Ctrl-click the left mouse button:

• Highlight all matching cards on the table

Shift-click the left mouse button:

• Highlight all cards with the same rank.

Two-handed play

Put three fingers of one hand on 'A' (auto drop), 'S' (undo) and 'D' (deal). You can also reach 'R' (redo) from there.

Left-handed people may prefer using 'L' (auto drop), 'K' (undo) and 'J' (deal).

Point-and-Click play

If you prefer Point-and-Click over Drag-and-Drop you can enable Quick play and use the right mouse button. See below.

Automatic play

Note that automatic play can spoil the gameplay, so purists should not enable any option but maybe Auto face up. Also, some games disable certain features as they would be trivial otherwise.

Auto face up

• Automatically face up all cards.

• Automatically drop cards to the Foundations.

• Automatically deal cards to the Waste stack if it is empty.

• Use the right mouse button to move piles around quickly. The logic involved is not too clever on purpose (i.e. it does not consult the hint system).

The animation is too slow...

Unfortunately the Tcl/Tk toolkit lacks a sprite concept, so there is a lot of (invisible double-buffered) redraw going on when dragging cards around.

Disabling Card shadow, Shade legal moves, background table tiles and sound will somewhat improve the display speed.

The table tiles look strange

Background table tiles should only be enabled when using a true-color video mode - otherwise they may look bad because of dithering.

BTW, you can add your own background tiles by copying the images to the main data/tiles or your home ~/.pysol/tiles directory. They must be in GIF or PPM format.

Some notes about scoring

• Scoring only begins after you make your first move. Also, if you undo all your moves back to the start the game won't score either.
• You will lose a game if you consume a hint or start demo mode.
• You can restart any time to get another chance to win this game.
• If you don't want to score a lost game you can temporarily change the player options.
• Loaded games don't count.
• If you win a game without using Undo, Quick play and any other of the assist functions you will be given special awards.
• There are no score values in PySol - you win a game, or you lose it. And don't even think about asking me to implement this nonsense - get a nice pinball game if you're a highscore freak...
• And finally always remember that this is a Patience game. Relax and enjoy.

Undocumented key bindings

• Space - Deal
• S - Undo
• Backspace - Undo
• Ctrl-A - Auto drop and face up cards in one step
• Ctrl-B - Change card background
• Ctrl-H - Show internal rating when giving a hint
• Ctrl-I - Change table tile
• Ctrl-N - Start a new game with the next game number
• Ctrl-P - Change player name
• Ctrl-T - Player statistics
• Ctrl-U - Play the next music song

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