City of Heroes Solitaire

You will need one deck of cards with Jokers removed.

Your contact has given you a mission... one of those that makes your fingers start to itch to write a rant post in the forums. Defeat all enemies, click 5 glowies and lead the hostage to the door. Oh, and did I mention that it's timed?

Yeah, one of THOSE missions.

You have 3 rounds to complete each of these objectives.

Game Play:

Cards are played to the four Foundation piles according to suit.

Clubs are the minions and Lt spawns on the map. Defeating them will satisfy the Defeat All portion of your mission objectives. Pairs totalling 13 can be moved to the foundation. That is 8 & 5, Ace(1) and Queen(12), Jack(11) and Deuce(2), etc. The King of Clubs is equal to 13 all on its own so it can go to the clubs foundation stack as soon as it appears. (Likely the king is that minion who wandered away from their spawn far enough for you to gank him without anyone else noticing.)

Diamonds are the glowies. You only need to find 5 of them: the 10, J, Q, K and Ace. However, you can not move any other diamonds to the foundation until ALL FIVE glowies are found. Once all glowies are in the foundation, the remaining diamonds may be placed in it as they appear.

Spades indicate the mission Boss. The Boss must be battled from max hit points down to defeat. In other words, spades must go to the foundation Ace first then in descending order (K,Q,J,10, etc) down to the 2. Once the deuce has been played to the spade foundation the Boss is defeated.

Hearts symbolize the hostage and their progress from the rescue point back to the door. They are played to the foundation from Ace to deuce in descending order. HOWEVER, the hostage is under the protection of the mission Boss. NO HEART may be played to the foundation until the Boss is defeated. In other words, the Heart Foundation may not be started until the Spades pile is complete.

The game is played in three rounds (symbolizing the mission timer). The first round has five Tableau piles. Gameplay starts by dealing five cards face up to the tableau.

Once cards are dealt to the Tableau they can only be moved from their pile in two cases:

1) The card can be played to the appropriate suit Foundation stack in the manner described above or...

2) If a Tableau stack has been emptied completely due to play to the Foundation, the top card of another tableau pile may be moved to fill it.

Cards are turned over one at a time from the stock pile and played to either the Foundation or the Tableau. Once all cards have been played from the stock pile collect up all the Tableau cards and shuffle them, start the next round. First round has five tableau piles, 2nd round has four while the 3rd round has only three tableau stacks.

If by the end of the third round you have not been able to place all cards in their appropriate foundation, mission Fails! No experience bonus, no inf bonus, you don't even get a copy of our home game.

All cards into the Foundation on the first round: Card Shark badge, purple recipe drop, 24 reward merits, experience bonus +25%, influence bonus +50%

All cards to the Foundation on the 2nd round: Solitaire Standing badge, yellow set recipe drop, 10 reward merits, normal experience, normal influence reward.

All cards to the Foundation during the 3rd round: Also Participated badge, Interrupt Time recipe drop, 0 reward merits, half normal experience, half normal influence.

Strategies:

* Clubs are going to be your worst nightmare. You need to spread them around to keep your options open for matches. Do not keep these all to one pile.

* Unless you're missing cards from your deck (you can decide for yourself if this is a metaphor or not) you will complete the Diamonds objective during the first round. Since this is true you might want to consider putting all your low value diamonds in one pile so when the five have been found you can empty the pile quickly.

* During the first round don't worry so much about hearts, concentrate on keeping your spades in some semblance of order in the Tableau stacks. Also try hard not to put spades and hearts in the same piles or else a heart will end up blocking a necessary spade.

VARIATIONS:

The PUG Variation: Deal the initial five tablea cards but instead of turning the cards up one at a time from the stock pile, turn them up three at a time to a discard pile. Only the top card may be played from the discard to the tableau at any given time. Yeah, PUGS are like that sometimes.

Task Force Variation: Two decks of cards mixed in together. 10 Glowies for diamonds (both sets of 10 thru Ace) played to Diamonds Foundation before other diamonds can be played. One pile for Clubs matches. Two bosses (two spade foundation piles which can be built simultaneously). Two hostages to rescue (Ace to deuce descending order, two stacks, each starting when one boss has been defeated.) Round one has six Tableau stacks, round 2 has five piles and round 3 has four.

I only have one question so far:

How do you have enough free time to come up with ideas like this?

You always have the most entertaining threads Steelclaw.