Learning Strategy from Solitaire: 2) Pyramid

What are the strategic lessons of the Pyramid game of solitaire? This game appears simpler than Klondike, discussed here, and it shares many of the same strategic elements, but it teaches a completely different set of principles. Its illusion of simplicity comes from the fact that we think we can plan ahead because we can see all the cards on the Ground. However, that often wastes a lot of time when speed is the essence of competition.

This game represents competitive situations where the ground has been well-explored. We can see what and where all the cards are. It is like a marketplace where all the prospects are identified and located, or a gold field where cores have been drilled and we know where the gold concentrations are placed. But even though we know the resource’s locations, we cannot directly access most of them because they are blocked by other cards.

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Mission, Ground, and Climate

As in all strategy, we have a Mission. The Microsoft version can set special missions such as getting a certain number of points, collecting a certain number of specific cards, or clearing a certain number of screens. It is shown at the top of the screen. Here it is collecting eleven jacks. Sometimes we can get extra deals if we cannot solve the current situation. This is not an option here, which we can see with the “0 deals” at the bottom. Winning supporters requires addressing the priorities of others. Only when we address their most important priorities, do their less important ones matter. The order of the cards on the board represents this order of priorities.

The Ground is the playing field or tableau. As in Klondike, it shows twenty-eight cards but here all dealt face up, showing our “known resources.” However, this game’s most important lesson is that seeing the Ground and understanding it are two very different things. Understanding often requires experimentation. It took me about four attempts to solve the screen shown.

The Climate is again represented by the deck, shown in the illustration as the face-up jack at the bottom of the screen. Next to it is the discard area which shows a seven. Since this game is played with a single deck, we can know which 24-resources are still in the deck at the start of the game. If we see three aces on the board, we know that only one ace is in the deck. We cannot know where. Again, the climate has unpredictable events that arise one after another. In this game, how the order of the cards in the deck matches the arrangement of cards on the Ground determines our path.

Each turn of a card from the deck is an event. It reveals a resource. When we turn over another card from the deck, the previous top card goes face up on the discard pile, covering the last card there. We can use the resource when it is on the top of deck or the discard pile. When we finish going through the deck once, we can go through it again only two more times. Since the order doesn’t change except for cards being removed, we can theoretically know the order in which they will appear the next time through. But we can’t really. Even when cycles repeat, they are too complex, and they change enough to become impossible for most of us to predict.

Methods

The game is played by matching resources with other resources. Both cards are removed from the playing field or the deck by matching them with their opposites. They can be matched from the board or from the deck. Sometime two cards from the board must be matched to win. Other times, cards must be match between the deck and the discard pile. Most of the time, we match a card from the deck or discard pile to the board.

This is the strategic concept of complementary opposites: every strength has its weakness; every need requires a matching resource. The opposite of each card in this game is simple. Queens match aces. Jacks match twos. For numbered cards, the magic number is lucky thirteen. For example, tens remove threes. Threes removed tens. So, there are four numbered pairs, 10/3, 9/4, 8/5 and 7/6 with the queen/ace and jack/2, a total of six pairs of opposites. The king has no opposite so it can be removed whenever it is uncovered.

In real life, complementary opposites are often much more complex than this game. For example, if you are a salesperson, you learn to match customer needs to product features and product features to customer needs. Every product has multiple features. Every customer has multiple needs. For each product, the needs and features are different, creating very complex real-world challenges of matching. One of the most important lessons that many salespeople never learn is that product features are meaningless unless they can be matched to a customer need. We remove customer needs by matching to features using the customer’s priorities. Playing the game Pyramid shows us how entangled situations can become. Figuring out how to deal with the order of priority is the strategic challenge.

Command

We must choose the order in which to remove cards. A common strategic problem is whether to play an available card from the deck or to wait to match that card to a card on the playing field when it is uncovered. When we have a choice of two cards, we have to choose one. For example, in the illustration, we can pick one of two threes to match to the ten on the board. We can only win the game if we choose the right one. The strategic challenge is, how do we discover which?

Sometimes future problems are easy to solve in our heads. For example, in the playing field, there are three queens and three aces. We must remove two of those queens to get at the aces. Seeing which two is easy. But in expert games like this, we must remove cards in a very specific order to unknot all the priorities. The fastest way to discover these problems is to work through the deck until we are stopped. Then we can go back to change our past decisions. Our experiments must fail to show us where the correct path lies.

This game is a real eye-opener for those who think that, with enough information about the situation, we can know the solution. What this game teaches us is that we must learn the flaws of solutions as well. This is the shortcoming at the heart of the “planning” model. All problems have simple solutions, most of which don’t work. If you want to try your hand at this game, it is in July 29, 2023’s daily challenges in Microsoft Solitaire.

Conclusions

If I were to devise a card game for Pyramid to teach the methods of strategy, it would only require making a deck that consisted of complementary opposites that are part of Sun Tzu’s strategic system. Only six pairs of opposites are needed. For example, a first set of opposites could match a type of “emptiness” with a balancing “fullness,” the weaknesses of organizations against the strengths of command, the weaknesses of command against the strengths of methods and so on. Unity would be the top card that frees itself. All three types of emptiness and weakness would also have to match one of the other types of strength or fullness.

I would love to hear your ideas on such a game.

Practical Strategy Based on Sun Tzu's Art of War is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.