The rules of a game are whatever the players of the game agree to. When you are playing solitaire, you are the only player, so the rules are whatever you say they are. Thus nothing you do could possibly be construed as cheating.
If you are competing with other people to see who can solve a solitaire game faster, then it becomes possible to cheat, but only because you are no longer playing solitaire.
Politaire is designed for players of solitaire.
Politaire allows you to change the rules of the game, because changing the rules of the game is one of the primary joys of solitaire.
Because solitaire players glory in rule changing, an absurdly large number of solitaire variations have come into existence. Politaire offers quite a few for your entertainment. Try them, and change them.
Politaire does not assign scores to you or time you. You know better than we when you have done well. It can count your wins and losses, but you can change the counts.
Politaire's solitairiness extends deep into the tangled bowels of it's programming. It runs entirely inside the browser on your computer. It uses no plugins. It performs no computations on the webserver it was loaded from, and posts no results back to it. It is designed so that, once loaded, you will be able to play even when you don't have a net connection, because everything will be saved in cache. (Unfortunately, smart phones and tablets often don't cache much, so you may be out of luck on the devices where this feature would be the most useful.)
Because it uses no plugins, Politaire doesn't run in the squdgy little box that Java and Flash games love so much. The play area fills the whole browser screen. Hit the "F11" key, and it will fill your whole computer. Great for those "Quadruple Klondike" games. But if you want other things on your screen too, go ahead and resize. Politaire will do it's best to live in the space you assign it.
Politaire allows you to save the changes you make to rules, or the new games you create, but only within your web browser. They cannot be accessed from anywhere else. It will, however, generate long, ugly URLs that you can give to other people to enable them to play your custom game.
Politaire is not, however, the solitary work of Jan Wolter. It incorporates the following open source resources created by other authors:
- The standard playing card images used in most games are derived from a
PySol card set taken from
gnome-games 1.0.2 (gdk-card-image) copyrighted by Heiko Eissfeldt, Michael Bischoff,
Felix Bellaby, Ryu Changwoo, and Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer.
- The floral border used in the suitless cards is derived from an
embroidery pattern from an 1855 Godey's Ladies Book.
- The very fine seedable random number generator normally
used here is by David Bau.
- The rather clunky and old-fashioned alternate random number generator used to generate Microsoft FreeCell compatible deals required exact integer arithmetic on numbers larger than Javascript normally dares contemplate. Masanao Izumo's BigInt library got us past that problem rather nicely.