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Questions tagged [cards]

For puzzles centered around playing cards.

A puzzle centered around playing cards. Typical features of playing cards are:

  • rank: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (X), Jack (J), Queen(Q), King (K), Ace (A)

  • suit: spades ($\spadesuit$), hearts ($\heartsuit$), diamonds ($\diamondsuit$) and clubs ($\clubsuit$)

  • color: red: $\color{red}{\heartsuit\diamondsuit}$ (hearts and diamonds), black: $\spadesuit\clubsuit$ (spades and clubs).

Many games (bridge, poker, pontoon, rummy, solitaire, ...) can be played with these cards. For questions about card games themselves, visit our sister site Board & Card Games Stack Exchange.

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Minigolf Solitaire

Golf is a form of patience (solitaire) in which you must remove cards from several tableaus, leaving as few as possible. Today, though, we're doing a round of Minigolf instead. Unlike Golf, there are 5 stacks, the cards only go up to 7, and there is…
Woofmao
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The Fitch Cheney Card Trick Extended

First, here is the original question which was also discussed here in Puzzling Beta: This is a two-person card trick. At the initial stage, the magician leaves the room. The magician's assistant takes a pack of playing cards (fifty-two cards, no…
blackened
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Perfect riffle shuffles

Take a deck of cards (with indexed position from 1 (top) to 52 (bottom)) and perform a perfect riffle shuffle, such that the top card (1) is still on top and the bottom (52) is still on the bottom. Amazingly, if you perform 8 such riffle shuffles…
Dr Xorile
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Card trick: guessing the suit if you see the remaining three cards (important is that you can't move or turn the cards)

Suske, Sidonia, Lambik, and Jerom are in a room. Wiske has them each draw a card of their choice from an open standard deck of cards and lay it face up on the table. The remaining cards are set aside. There are four card suits: hearts, diamonds,…
user82944
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Are there truly unwinnable Calculation decks?

Calculation is a solitaire variant known for its large skill ceiling; supposedly, the large majority of games can be won by skilled human players, whereas the games to be won by uninformed play are in a slim minority (of these two facts, I can only…
Feryll
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Solitaire Puzzle

This one shouldn't be too hard. Preparation stage: Take a shuffled deck of standard playing cards and deal 13 face-down piles of 4 cards each. Pick up each pile, arrange the order of the cards however you like, and put it back face-down before…
Caleb
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Who's the winner of this card game?

During a round of a card game big two, two players decide to show off their hands. The 1st player has ♥3 ♥4 ♥4 ♥6 ♥6 ♥8 ♥8 ♥K, and the 2nd player has ♠7 ♠9 ♠9. It's the 1st player's turn, and he can start with any single card or valid pairs. Now…
user1032613
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98 Cards: Optimal Strategy with Rule of Ten's

I recently found the game "98 Cards" by VdH and wondered if there is an optimal strategy to play it. Rules: There is only one player. Cards with each of the numbers $2$ to $99$ are contained in the main stack once, in a random, unknown…
Orphevs
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In the three-card monte, can a logical principle be applied to increase the odds?

Assuming the game is played without cheating, in the three-card monte, can a logical approach increase the player's chance of beating the house? At first glance it would seem to be unlikely but a recent article in the BBC news indicates that in the…
James Jenkins
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Spider Solitaire - maximum number of cards in a single column

What is the maximum number of cards you can have in a single column of four-suit Spider Solitaire? The diagram below has 11 cards in column 2, more than any other column. Obviously, the correct answer is much bigger than 11. Assume standard rules:…
happystar
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A Desperate Loss (Spider Solitaire)

This is a Spider Solitaire problem inspired by a hand I played today on my phone. Hopefully it’s easier than previous puzzles (where I got no satisfactory response). It is assumed the reader knows the rules and terminology of Spider, which is…
happystar
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Yet Another Interesting Spider Solitaire Hand (August 2023)

This is an interesting hand that arose when I was playing Spider Solitaire on my mobile phone. I aim to win without undoing any moves, but the number of moves required is irrelevant. WARNING: I apologise if this question is too long for most folk.…
happystar
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Spider Solitaire - Minimum Guaranteed Turnovers

Consider the following game-state in Spider Solitaire. Although this game is not the most popular compared to others (e.g. poker, chess, backgammon etc) I assume the reader is familiar with the basic ruleset which is easily found online. I assume…
happystar
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How to produce an anti-snap random pack of card with the least work?

An antisnap pack of cards has no cards the same type one after another. You have say 10 sets of 10 different cards together sequentially- 10 of Type 1, 10 of Type 2.... What is the most efficient way (with the least number of intermediate piles of…
user2617804
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How do you do the card trick like the Fitch Cheney Card trick with four cards instead of five? You only need to know the suit of the card

You have four cards. The assistant takes one of the four cards away (the card that follows their tactic). The other cards stay where they are (don’t turn them, move them…). Then the magician comes in and can determine the suit of the fourth card by…
Magiciangeek
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