Worm Hole, a game invented by Ian Gent from Solvitaire, is played similarly as Black Hole, except there is a free cell available.
Since a free cell tends to make the game a bit too easy in my opinion, I thought of a variation to allow the free cell to be used only one time (similar to Ephemeral FreeCell by Michael Keller), so that it's more of a lifeline than a tool you can repeatedly abuse. I call this game "Unstable Worm Hole", which makes sense to me in the context of Star Trek ("Captain! Analysis of the triangulated sensor data indicates that the wormhole is becoming increasingly unstable! If we hurry, we may still have time to use it once before it collapses forever!"). The win rate of Unstable Worm Hole is surprisingly high (98.76%), which means that you only need to use a free cell once to win most losing deals of Black Hole.
| Free Cell | Games Won | Win Rate % |
|---|---|---|
| Single Use | 987,562 | 98.76 |
| Unlimited Use | 998,908 | 99.89 |
The deals not listed as won in the table above are all proven losses (there were no inconclusive results).
If you are curious about what goes into the making of a solitaire solver, or perhaps you program your own solitaire solvers and wish to know my "secrets", I have written technical details describing how I wrote this solver.
Any comments are welcome, please send to:
Last modified March 30, 2022
Copyright ©2022 by Mark Masten. All rights reserved.