🏠 Alpine

Alpine is a solitaire card game designed by Austin Palmer with its rules available online from Boardgame Geek and there's a video explaining the game courtesy of Totally Tabled.

You start with a hand of 10 cards and the object is to clear your hand — in game mechanics jargon shedding — three times by placing cards in ascending, equal, or descending order, making it a climbing game which is it's theme.

You can reduce the number of cards in your hand each round by either placing a consecutive series of cards of any suit in the Ascend box, one or more cards of equal value in the Traverse box, or cards of the same suit in the Descend box.

For this webapp version, once you have made your set (aka route), click on the play area which is any of the three boxes to the left of "Ascend", "Traverse", and "Descend".

The suit of the final card in the set decides how many cards you have to add back to your hand. For Ascend, the last card will be the highest value, for traverse you can pick the suit, and for descend the lowest value card is the "anchor". The number of cards you draw at the end of each round is capped by the number of cards played in the set.

Clubs

One per card in your hand with a lower value than the anchor.

Diamonds

One per diamond in your hand.

Hearts

One per card in your hand with a higher value than the anchor.

Spades

One per suit played in that round's set excluding spades.

The previously played set limits the choice in the following round. The next set has to be higher:

1. More cards in the new "trail" than the previous set makes it higher.
2. As in the above layout, an Ascend is higher than the other two, and a Traverse is higher than a Descend.
3. The new route has a higher value "anchor" than the previous route.

If you don't have a higher route in your hand, or chose to, "rest" by clicking the top left deck which is the "fatigue" pile. This starts with one card. Resting causes the previous route to get discarded, allowing you to play any route. You have to add the fatigue pile which starts with one card, and grows by a card each time you rest.

When you play a route which empties your hand, it becomes a "milestone" which is stored on the right-hand side of the play area in its route type box. Reaching a milestone starts a new round with 10 fresh cards, and another card is added to the fatigue pile. The new milestone only replaces the previous milestone if it's higher. You win once you reach your third milestone.

You lose if you need to draw cards and both the deck and fatigue piles are empty.