Setup

You will need a 52 card deck of playing cards. Jokers are not used in Skipper Solitaire. Find all the aces and lay them in a row in front of you, so you can play cards on top of them.

Shuffle the remaining cards into a draw pile on the left side of the aces and draw 5 cards. Leave space for a discard pile on the left side of the draw pile.

Gameplay

You have two possible actions for your turn: play cards from your hand down onto the suit stacks or discard cards.

When playing cards from your hand onto the suit stacks, you must play cards onto the stack of the same suit and in ascending order e.g. you can play the 5 of diamonds on the 4 of diamonds, but you cannot place the 5 of diamonds on the 4 of spades.

The only exception to this rule is that queens and kings, a.k.a. "skippers", can be played on any card in any suit stack. Queens and Kings are skippers and let you skip cards in a stack. Queens let you to skip a single card in the stack, while Kings allow you to skip up to two cards. For example you can play a Queen of diamonds onto the to 5 of spades and then lay the 7 of spades on the Queen of diamonds. The Queen of diamonds lets you skip the 6 of spades. Likewise, you can play a king of hearts on an ace of spades, then play a 4 of spades on that king of hearts, because the king lets you skip the 2 and 3 of spades. You can play a king to skip only one card and you may play skippers on other skippers. You may play as many cards as you want during a single turn.

Instead of playing cards onto the suit stacks for your turn, you can discard as many cards as you like. If you have no playable cards in your hand, you must discard at least 1 card.

At the end of your turn, draw until you have 5 cards in your hand. If you draw any cards that have been skipped by a face cards, you may immediately trash them by setting them aside or putting them back in the box and continue drawing until you have 5 cards. For example, if you draw the 3 of hearts, but the 6 of hearts is on the top of the hearts stack, you may trash the 3 of hearts and keep drawing until you have 5 cards. Flip the discard pile over into a new draw pile if the draw pile runs out. Alternatively you could shuffle it.

Winning the game

You win when all of the suit stacks are completed with a face card, i.e. a jack, queen, or king, of the corresponding suit.

If you want to be competitive, keep track of how many turns it takes you to win and see if you do better in your next game! Or time your game and try to play faster.

Alternative rules

Easier

• Skippers are more powerful: kings skip up to 3 cards, queens skip up to 2, and jacks become a skipper and skip 1.
• Instead of incorporating skippers into the skipped stack, use the skipper and place it in the discard pile. The skipper will then be reshuffled into the draw pile and can then be used multiple times per game.
• If using the discard skippers rule above, then you may extend the requiring books to be finished by only a king.
• Allow playing off the top of the diacard pile. This feels good.

Harder

• Skippers may be played only on their suit's stack, for example the king of spades may only be played on the spades stack.
• You may not trash cards that have been skipped. You cannot play them, and they may only be discarded. This makes the game feel worse, I think.
• Reduce the hand size to 4 or 3. This game is nothing with a hand size of 1.
• Start with zero cards out. possibly still require still to be started by Aces. The game feels better with Aces out at the start.
• You may only discard if you have no playable cards. This feels worse.
• Skippers are less powerful. Only Kings skip 1 card. Queens don't skip. Suits end with Queens.
• This game is boring with zero skippers
• Before starting the game, randomly remove 4 cards if you have 8-12 total skips. This way you can't simply use your skips as soon as you get them. You use all your skips so you cannot skip a card that's been removed.

Testing

I taught this game to Rebecca and Megan Gorsline on 2020-02-11 and we raced to see who could finish the stacks fastest. They understood the rules easily and could play on their first game.

They showed that it was non trivial and not boring, enough to play a few times. Rebecca wanted the Jacks to do something and to add more spice. They both said the math of the Kings skipping they had to get used to, but they both got it soon.

Games are also like an object oriented class definition. They define the relationships among the object's properties, but you can have many instances of the same class (game) with different values for the objects' properties. Games can have different components that are modules that can be changed, also, such as a way of collecting resources.