Bear River: help file suggestions, and a question.
I've been playing Bear River recently. The help file states:
There is never a disadvantage in moving cards to the Foundations.
However, it can sometimes be advantageous to put off moving a card to an empty foundation slot. For example: suppose the base card is, say, 5. After some play, you expose the 5 of clubs in the main part of the board. You can move it to an empty foundation. But, perhaps, you could move the 4 of clubs onto it instead. This could be a better move if moving the 4-club would open up an empty right-side "hole" pile. Moving the 4-club might be hard once the 5 is put on the foundation. Note that this doesn't apply to the 6 of clubs, since it can be moved to the foundation after the 5. So, it is always good to move a card onto a non-empty foundation pile.
Also, the help file also says:
Bear River can be won about one third of the time.
My personal percentage of wins is closer to 40%. I was curious about this so I recently wrote a simple brute-force perl script to play the game. It just methodically tries all moves, backing up only when the entire board configuration is repeated. To my surprise, more than half of the games are winnable, about 57 or 58%. Some wins take a lot of moves, however.
Finally, I'm curious about the origin of this game, and the name "Bear River." A google search doesn't reveal anything.
Thanks!
-Jeff