I am guilty of indulging in the huge waste of time that is solitaire; particularly, any of the 30 varieties included in Smallware’s Solebon Solitaire, which—if you’re looking for a solitaire app for the iPhone that is both a joy to play and very artfully done—you’ll want to buy (c’mon, it’s only $1.99).
For example, it required an investment of one hour, 52 minutes, and 20 seconds, but my sixty-sixth game of Aces Up was the one. After 65 consecutive losses, I’ve finally won a game! Mission accomplished for the day.
I took a look through Solebon’s statistics and found the following:
- Aces Up: 66 games played in 1:52:20; 1 won, 65 lost; 1.5% win/loss ratio
- Eight Off: 68 games played in 10:38:01; 62 won, 6 lost; 91.2%
- Fortune’s Favor: 26 games played in 58:00; 26 won, none lost; 100%
- Klondike Deal 1: 12 games played in 31:08; 7 won, 5 lost; 58.3%
- Klondike Deal 3: 6 games played in 28:34; 1 won, 5 lost; 16.7%
- La Belle Lucie: 3 games played in 6:58; none won, 3 lost; 0%
- Lady of the Manor: 74 games played in 2:06:19; 17 won, 57 lost; 23.0%
- Monte Carlo: 9 games played in 25:13; 2 won, 7 lost; 22.2%
- Penguin: 495 games played in 55:07:30; 448 won, 47 lost; 90.5%
- Pyramid: 16 games played in 29:28; 2 won, 14 lost; 12.5%
Add all that up, and it means I’ve blown 72 hours, 43 minutes, and 31 seconds on 775 games of solitaire since I purchased Solebon on October 4. I find it hard to believe but, unless my calculations are wrong (which is totally possible), that translates into about 50 minutes of solitaire for every single day since I bought the game.
Holy shit.
2 Comments
I too waste a ridiculous amount of time on phone solitare – but for me it’s all Klondike Deal 3. I’ve tried several other types, but they’re never as satisfying. You definitely have me beat for time – I’ve only played 6 hours, 41 minutes since I got it over the summer.
I’m so glad that Minesweeper doesn’t have a “how long you’ve played” timer on it. Holy shit.
(By the way, sometime in high school when Runescape was still relatively small, some of my friends and a lot of the top players e-mailed the creators of the game to see if they could look at the logs and tell how long they’d been playing the game. Suddenly, a string of top players quit as soon as they realized they’d devoted more than a thousand hours to the game in the past year. The creators of the game then stopped giving out this information.
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