The Sample Games

When you use Undo or Undo All to “rewind” a game, the moves you are undoing are not forgotten. If you save the game, you can open it again later, and you can still redo the moves that you undid.

This lets us give you a set of saved games that can show you how an unfamiliar solitaire should be played. The folder “Sample Games” contains 33 saved games*, one for each variety of solitaire in Solitaire Till Dawn. These games were played to the end, then rewound back to their beginning, and then saved. Here’s how to watch a sample game:

A sample game is like a videotape

“Playing” a sample game is different from playing a game yourself. Normally you make your own decisions about what moves to make, and you click or drag the cards yourself to make those moves. But the sample games have already been played, all the way to a successful win; then they were “rewound” back to the beginning (like rewinding a tape) and saved that way. Just like a tape, rewinding doesn’t erase any of the moves, and you can still play them back and see the moves that the original player made. 

So when you first open a sample game, you’ll see the start of the game—the initial layout. To see the first move that the original player made, press the space bar on your keyboard (or select Redo from the Edit menu, or type command-R). To see the next move, press space or select Redo again. You can keep going all the way to the end of the game. 

The move counter

As you play, the move counter (at the lower-left of the window) will show you how many moves have been made. At the start of a game, it will read zero, because no moves have been made yet. Every time you Redo, it will increase by one.

At our Web site at <http://www.semicolon.com/>, we have some articles on winning strategies. Each article discusses a particular kind of solitaire (Klondike, Pyramid, and others) and each is illustrated with a sample game that you can download. As you read the article, play back its sample game. The article will tell you about particular moves in the sample game by giving you the move counter reading. For example, if the article says “At move 32...” you should make sure that the move counter says “32” while you read that part of the article, so you can see the part of the game that the article is discussing. 

Rewind and Fast Forward

You can also back up, if you’ve gone too far forward or if you want to see a sequence of moves again. Just select Undo from the Edit menu (or type command-Z, or press the ESC key) to back up one move and decrease the move counter by one. You can use Redo and Undo to go forward and back as much as you like.

If you need to go forward or back a long ways, select Undo All or Redo All from the Edit menu. The game will start to undo or redo moves continuously. It will stop by itself when it reaches the beginning or end of the game; or you can stop it in the middle just by clicking the mouse or pressing any key. 

Don’t make your own moves!

Important: Don’t click or drag any cards yourself when you’re watching a sample game; that will make the program forget all the moves that come after that point, and then you won’t be able to follow the article any more. If you do it by accident, just close the window without saving, and then open the sample game again. You’ll be at the start of a game again; use Redo All to quickly get back to where you left off. 

If a sample game is locked or is on a read-only volume, Solitaire Till Dawn 3.1 and later won’t allow you to make your own moves. You will only be able to Redo and Undo the moves that were originally saved with the game.
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* We are indebted to Darryl Andrews for sending us a won game of Accordion. In 25 years of trying, we had never managed to win a game of Accordion; but Mr. Andrews contributed his for our collection — and by studying his strategy, we were finally able to begin winning games of our own! You can read about his winning strategy at our Web site at <http://www.semicolon.com/>.