BLUEMOON(6)

🌙✨ BLUEMOON ✨🌙

okay so real talk, bestie — this is bluemoon, the Blue Moon card solitaire situation, and it's genuinely such a vibe. 🎀 it lives in section 6 of the manual (games, iykyk).

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

bluemoon

that's it. that's the whole call. no flags, no drama, no --help-core behaviour. just launch it and let the cards do their thing. 💅

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's the setup, and listen closely 'cause the rules are the moment. 🫶

you start with a 52-card deck — the entire deck, fully shuffled — and it gets dealt out into four rows. then the aces get scooped up and moved to the left end of the layout, which conveniently gives you 4 initial free spaces to play with. slay. ✨

now the actual move rule, and this is where people mess up, so like, pay attention:

• you can move a card into a space only if it matches the left neighbor in suit and is one greater in rank.

kings are high, which means nothing can ever be placed to their right — those spots just become dead spaces 💀 and yes, that's as tragic as it sounds.

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when no moves can be made (oof, it happens 😭), the cards that are still out of sequence get reshuffled and dealt face up after the ends of the partial sequences. each sequence gets left with a card space after it, so every row ends up looking like:

a partial sequence, then a space, then enough cards to make a row of 14.

it's giving "controlled chaos" and honestly? iconic. 🌈

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and now the fun part — the math. 🧚 a moment's reflection (their words, not mine, but they ate) shows this game cannot take more than 13 deals. periodt. so here's your scorecard:

• 1–3 deals — a good score, you're kinda the main character 👑
• 4–7 deals — average, mid but respectable, no cap
• 8 or more — poor, and we're not gonna talk about it 🙈

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💜 AUTHORS 💜

originally written by Tim Lister — shoutout to the founder, fr fr. 🫡

the visual user interface and color support are by Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> — and the ncurses version was written in November 1994 (yes, before most of us existed, and it still slays 💀).

for updates, plus other software and resources by ESR, hit up http://www.catb.org/~esr/ ⭐

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okay that's the whole page bestie, go forth and shuffle responsibly 💖 this lil rewrite was served up as bluemoon from 05/21/2014 — section BLUEMOON(6) of the games manual — mwah, bye! 🎀✨