Why the fuck did I do this

July 11th, 2023

I loved Shenzhen IO, but I loved it's solitaire even more. I remember "Win 10 games" feeling impossible and the game's fictional creator being basically like "idk maybe it's too hard but have you tried getting good?" but soon those games went by super fast. The iOS port made it FAR worse.

in April of 2017 I did my first 100 wins. Two months later it was 400. By the end of that year it was 2000. By 2018 it was 5000??? At the end of 2019 I'm at 7000, clearly on pace to finish this pointless task, but then the pandemic happens and while that seems like a great time for solitaire, there is a huge two year gap in my photos, where I finally tack on 500 games, two years later. 7500.

I was at lot slower in the last quarter but that's fine, I have other things to do besides solitaire. Hell, returning to fighting games probably filled a lot of that void. "Lemme just load up training mode real quick", which explains the 2 year gap.

The last 200 games were like a month which was closer to my old pace. But even then, at my peak, if I was stuck someplace boring I could bang out 100 wins in a day. Here, I didn't race to the finish line until the last 25

It's gonna be so hard to convince myself to start a new hand.

I'm not a big solitaire fan otherwise and I've spent a lot of time asking why this one 'hits' for me where others don't and I think it's because of how the 'face cards' work. The unstackable "dragons" that you have to expose and then sacrifice a free cell to get rid of. The dragons really define the boundaries and barriers of a given board in a way that feels more tactile to me than other solitaire games which I would describe as feeling "softer" or "fuzzier" to play for me. So somehow this little side game inside a game ruined me lol thank god I don't got a gametime counter on iOS.