"Birds of a Feather" Solitaire Card Game


Birds of a Feather
Introduction

“Birds of a feather flock together.”

Materials: a standard, shuffled 52-card deck

Setup: Deal cards singly, face-up into a grid (e.g. 4-by-4).

Object: Form a single stack of all cards. (For more a more general objective, see Birds of a Feather.)

Play: A player may move one stack of cards onto another stack of cards in the same row or column if the cards on top of the stacks have either

  1. the same suits, or

  2. the same or adjacent ranks. 

Aces are low and not adjacent to kings, so rank adjacency is according the ordering A, 2, 3, …, J, Q, K.

Example 4-by-4 grid deal:

Birds of a Feather Deal

Example solution: JS-JC TS-9H JS-5S KS-3S KS-KC JS-KS JS-TS 6H-7D 6H-5C 6H-8H QH-AH QH-TH QH-3H QH-JS QH-6H

Additional Resources

Papers:

Determining Solvability in the Birds of a Feather Card Game
Shuto Araki, Juan Pablo Arenas Uribe, Zach Wilkerson, Steven Bogaerts, Chad Byers
Pages 9627-9634 |  PDF

Computational Intractability and Solvability for the Birds of a Feather Game
Richard Hoshino, Max Notarangelo
Pages 9648-9655 |  PDF

Machine Learning Based Heuristic Search Algorithms to Solve Birds of a Feather Card Game
Bryon Kucharski, Azad Deihim, Mehmet Ergezer
Pages 9656-9661 |  PDF

Efficient Solving of Birds of a Feather Puzzles
Todd W. Neller, Connor Berson, Jivan Kharel, Ryan Smolik
Pages 9686-9692 |  PDF

Computer Generation of Birds of a Feather Puzzles
Todd W. Neller, Daniel Ziegler
Pages 9693-9699 |  PDF

A Monte Carlo Tree Search Player for Birds of a Feather Solitaire
Christian Roberson, Katarina Sperduto
Pages 9700-9705 |  PDF

A Neural Network Approach for Birds of a Feather Solvability Prediction
Benjamin Sang, Sejong Yoon
Pages 9706-9712 |  PDF

Poster:

Predicting Unsolvable Deals in the Birds of a Feather Solitaire Game
Richard Hoshino, Maximilian Kahn
Pages 9748-9749 |  PDF

© Todd W. Neller

TinyURL address: https://tinyurl.com/boafpuzzle