| Baker's Game | |
| Subtitle: | A Patience game |
| Image Caption: | A partially completed game of Baker's Game on PySolFC |
| Alt Names: | Brain Jam |
| Type: | Open packer |
| Namedvariants: | FreeCell |
| Deck: | Single 52-card |
| Family: | Freecell |
Baker's Game is a patience or solitaire card game similar to FreeCell. It predates FreeCell, and differs from it only in the fact that sequences are built by suit, instead of by alternate color. This makes the game more difficult to complete successfully.
One of the oldest ancestors of Baker's Game is Eight Off. In the June 1968 edition of Scientific American, Martin Gardner described in his "Mathematical Games" column a game by C. L. Baker, that is now known as Baker's Game. Gardner wrote "The game was taught to Baker by his father, who in turn learned it from an Englishman during the 1920s".[1]
The description of Baker's Game in the "Mathematical Games" column inspired Paul Alfille to create FreeCell and he coded it for the PLATO educational computer system, which ended up becoming more popular than Baker's Game.[2]
(Adapted from the FreeCell's article Rules.)
Construction and layout:
Building during play:
Moves:
Victory:
Variant: To make the game even more difficult, allow only kings to be placed on an empty tableau spot.
Freecell Solver, a solver for some variants of Patience game, including Baker's Game,[3] was run on the first 10 million deals of Baker's Game with 4 reserve cells based on the Microsoft FreeCell deals, in order to collect statistics.[4] The solver was run using a preset that guarantees an accurate verdict. Out of the 10 million deals, 7,431,962 were solvable (making for an average win rate of 74.3%), and the average number of moves required to solve was 107.5 moves (unoptimized).