Variations and Related Games * Im getting awfully good at FreeCell. How can I make the game more challenging?
The only drawback to FreeCell is that about half the deals are pretty easy once you’re experienced (of course you can try the lists of difficult deals). Dennis Cronin’s NetCELL, an online Java version of FreeCell, has an ingenious algorithm to make deals harder or easier, by dealing more high cards at the tops of columns and low cards at the bottoms of columns (and vice versa). Originally the difficulty scale ran from 1 to 20, but he found that the higher numbers paradoxically were less difficult, and the maximum level available on the server is now level 12. There is a very competitive list (with hundreds of players), ranked by consecutive wins. The server also keeps track of winning percentage and average solving time for each player, and offers continuous tournaments (both long and short) every day with a mixture of variant games. When playing single games, in each game, you start at level 5 (pretty easy), and go up one level after every 10 consecutive wins, until you reach level 10
