Bobby's Beautiful Bugs
Made in ~48 of the 72 allotted hours for LD56 -- the "tiny creatures" theme really stumped us this time around. Art inspired by Space Sandwich's Insecta palette.
Help Bobby sort his bug collection in this solitaire variant. The default setting is what we found to be the most balanced gameplay, however the Brainy preset is definitely worth a go...or ten. Customize gameplay to be easier by reducing [cards per suit] or increasing [columns], and vice versa to increase difficulty.
---Controls------------------------
[Mouse]..........click 'n drag cards
---Shortcuts------------------------
[R]..............reset/deal new
[Z]..............undo last move
Download
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Development log
- Butterfingers (v1.3.0)29 days ago
- Smooth Moves (v1.2.0)58 days ago
- Auto-Cascade & Bug Fixes (v1.0.5)Feb 21, 2025
- It's official, there's a new (old?) rule! (v1.0.4)Feb 14, 2025
- Minor bugfixNov 20, 2024
- Hold the applauseOct 29, 2024
- LD Bug FixesOct 09, 2024
Comments
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Oooh, that's so cute !
Might have said it before, but this is a great game! I've started playing it with playing cards since I don't have my laptop rn, only the "?" doesn't quite work since I only have 3 types of Jokers. If it's not too much work, do you think an android version is possible? Then I can continue enjoying the graphics & music on the move :) Also, do you know what this solitaire/patience variation is called, or did you come up with it on your own? ^^
I think this is clearly inspired by Spider Solitaire! It's very similar to this, however in Spider Solitaire not all cards are laid down and some stay in the stock.
I think the difference to spider solitaire are precisely what makes this variation so great though, which is why I'm asking for the name ^^
It's of course inspired by spider & klondike solitaire, but it is far enough from both that I would call it its own thing.
Besides some minor differences, like only 1 deck and the extra"?" cards, there's a lot less luck involved, and a much higher variety of moves available. The four slots that you don't have in spider but can put any card in compared to klondike are very versatile for juggling, but do have their limits if you are not careful to keep enough buffer, which is an interesting dynamic to me. I also appreciate that you can put any card in empty slots, as you aren't arbitrarily limited like some solitaire/patience variants where you can only put kings there. Beyond these rule changes, which give a surprising amount of depth to the moveset that it took me hours to learn, as I said, there's not much luck involved either. Since all cards are laid out at the beginning, you only have the element of luck that one time. Beyond that, the only luck element is how much risk you are willing to take by not looking far enough into moves, & that decision lays in your own hands, so you can only blame yourself, not the draw of a pile :)
Also, I just saw that thei're working on android on patreon, nice :D
Not the same, but a similar variant is Seahaven Towers Solitaire.
Estou viciado! Eu amei tudo nesse jogo. Visual, música, efeitos sonoros, a forma de interagir no menu. Infelizmente o meu Windows 11 está bloqueando a inicialização do jogo ao baixá-lo, mas no site está funcionando perfeitamente. Estou umas 3 horas jogando e fico impressionado como o nosso cérebro vai ficando cada vez mais eficiente e superando níveis mais difíceis. Fiz a conta só para comentar. Parabéns aos desenvolvedores, me prendeu de verdade.
As you can see in the image, I like to sort all the cards before finishing the game. I never put the aces in the top slots.
Could you add a feature to make sure all the cards go into the right slots? Like a double-click on the ace, right-click, or something else.
Also, as you can see, the column of red cards is always shorter than the others.
That’s an interesting idea, we’ll experiment with that when we get back to working on this (currently focusing on Peggy’s Post).
It looks like you found an edge case with a quality of life feature we added in the last update. When you build a stack large enough that the cards would go off screen, the game squishes the stack so to keep the cards visible. The cards should decompress when you move them, but it looks like you discovered some way to get by the decompression. Do you by any chance remember what you did with the red cards?
I've played other games, and this doesn't always happen. This time it's the yellow cards, and the compression is less than in the previous image. But I don't know exactly why it happens. I often swap groups of cards between the slots at the bottom and those in the deck at the top, but I don't think that's the cause. Probably, when there's a really long column, the default card spacing isn't reset.
P.S.
If I close the browser tab, when I reopen it, the cards are perfectly aligned. This is probably because the table is reloaded with the correct value.
I wonder how you're getting the shorter column, I've finished 25 games trying to replicate this and I've never had a short column!
Edit: Okay it finally happened haha, can confirm this little visual glitch
This game is so charming! I really enjoyed the gameplay and the artwork. You did a really good job :)
Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed <3
I like the game a lot. The only game on this site, i play regularly, since i found it.
Sometimes a "balanced" pattern is harder than a "brutal" one, that's sometimes annoying but i don't think you can do anything about it, i guess it's just math.
But i would like to have an option to restart the same game again. As far as i understand, you can't do that right now. A restart gives you a new starting pattern. Maybe you could bookmark starting patterns to play them again later (that's probably too complicated to implement).
Restarting the same game, would be awesome, i think a lot of people would appreciate it.
Thanks :) def agree, that’d be awesome! We’ll add it to the next update
100 Brutal wins!
Very nice game! If you intend to update the game again, I'd love to get more statistics, especially a winning streak and win rate.
Most seeds seem very hard at first, but I found that with proper technique and calculation, about 70-75% are for sure achievable. I think like 10-15% more are possible but a bit too complex and I couldn't find the winning moves. I found once a pattern that was impossible though, I think (but that's fine, it's bound to happen haha). My best right now is 6 win in a row!
Nice, what do you think is your winning rate at brutal? 70-75, as you said?
Yeah around 70-75%! I did some Balanced games and haven't lost, so I'm guessing more than 90% Balanced games are clearable with the right sequence.
It's probably possible to go higher on Brutal but sometimes I am really stumped on what move sequence I should go for haha
I agree with your other comment, it would be really nice to be able to replay a seed! I've had so many brutal games where I almost found a winning sequence but made a calculation mistake along the way and wanted to see where it was!
Nice! We can definitely add those stats into the next update, I think that’s a great idea :) We also thought that a decent chunk of the seeds were unsolvable, long story short, about 95.5% brutal seeds are possible to solve! You can scroll to the bottom of this post for the winnable stats for all the difficulties
Good, that broadly corresponds to my intuition then! I wonder how hard is that last 5% I couldn't understand at all! Very great game by the way!
Great chill card game! I would like to suggest that after changing settings, allow the the Start card to auto-swap with the Settings card. Right now, it requires dragging the Settings card down and then dragging the Start card up.
ooh, I think we could make that happen ;)
Can you tell I have a bit of an addiction? 😅
<3
such a nicely executed solitaire! So satisfying and calming to play
I already won more than 400 games. Very fun and aesthetic game :)
I really like the deck art and the music they go will the overall aesthetic of the game. When playing the game on moblie on the web build it felt very smooth. Would recommend playing😁
I encountered 2 bugs during my attempts at brutal difficulty
the first is that occasionally, one card either doesn't exist or appears invisible. A blue four was missing, but as soon as I cleared the blue 5, it moved to the blue 3 on it's own.
the second is I couldn't seem to move a stack off the 2nd slot of the finish pile, thus softlocking me from finishing even though the 3 other stacks were complete. Other than that, fun brain stretcher of a game
this is good but i suck ass at solitaire
need. tutorial.
The tutorial is in the top right corner after you start the game. I would also suggest learning how to play solitaire in general if you haven’t before. Hope this helps!
A very nice version of Solitaire. Love it!
Lol I wanted to listen to music of my own choice but unfortunately the music will not fully mute, the jazz always comes back..... Love the game!!
You can usually mute tabs depending on your browser.
lol it was just the solo i forgot to mute
“Yes mom. Your son did it… I win!”
really enjoying it :) great vibes. at the point where I can win brutal difficult about 50% of the time
I think my only request would be the ability to disable auto-cascade while playing. There are some rare delicate operations where you don't actually want the cascade to happen and instead want to move your stack on top of a newly-revealed card to free up the
Nice spin on the solitaire ! the brutal mode does deserve its name.
The cards are really charming too, i love the little critters :D
Really fun game, I enjoy the different modes and the art and music are really good and relaxing. It would be really nice to be able to set the number of undos since usually trying something out takes a couple moves and it would be more relaxing to be able to just try things.
Fantastic game, I love the aesthetics, and the music is quality!
Really great variant! I've beat Brutal twice now.
I wonder what card would come after ? if you allowed 15 cards per suit
Some very contented gameplay, just a hint of critique ;)
i win
this might just be my sleep-deprived brain, but for some reason, whenever i hit "R" to try and draw a new card, my game just keeps resetting instead. am i exhausted and crazy?? lol, but otherwise a very beautiful game, i love it!
you can't draw cards. all cards are already in play.
well executed, smooth jazz, I love this experience. Classic solitaire, just as maddening as the original (lots of me resetting :p )
I started with just Aces on four slots, and when I won I did it again with Aces and Twos, and then I added threes, etc... I got to 8 before I gave up, Ha!
love this game, another banger digitarium!
i wanted to ask if each hand is achievable? like each game you play will result in a win?
also what does the solo slider in the settings do?
That’s a great question! And unfortunately, no, we can’t guarantee that each hand is solvable today.
Generally that should be (theoretically) possible to achieve, but it would require a very substantial amount of work to accomplish. Many solitaire variants have been proven to be NP-complete problems, and most likely this variant also falls into that category. Roughly speaking, what that means is that the only way to check if a specific shuffle/deal is solvable is to attempt each move until you win, or you’ve exhausted all move options and know that it’s not solvable. It’s possible that we could cut some corners, but we’d need to read some scientific papers on that topic to see if any of the corner cutting techniques could be applied to BBB specifically. So, to do the actual verification, we’d need to write an automatic solver program, and run it against every possible deck shuffle (for each difficulty mode we support). This is a lot of work to write the solver program (and make sure it works correctly), and would probably take weeks to just execute the solver against all these possible shuffles and difficulty modes (on a normal computer). If we ever end up having some free time, we might go down that rabbit hole, but until then, we have no easy way to check. As you can probably see I’ve already seriously considered embarking on this journey…
The solo slider controls the trumpet solo audio track track.
ahhhh i see, thank you for your help!
with the code for the solver program, i can only imagine how nitty gritty it can get!
again, amazing game and i love seeing your creations!
I think if I were going to guarantee solvability, I'd probably try to write it backwards: perform a series of random reversed operations (I think moving any stack of sequential cards to any destination is a "legal" inverse move) to a solved game until it ends up in a shuffled state.
Beautiful solitaire game!
Smooth jazz bug solitaire is one of my favourite games to wind down at the end of the day. I play it almost day. thanks for making it!
sorry Ive never played solataire before and I dont understand what the question mark means? where does it go?
It's just an additional card like a joker! In the higher difficulties, sort A -> ?, so it goes after the K
This is fun to play, though I’m really bad at bug solitaire.
(I don’t really know that much about solitaire in general)
the aesthetics of the game are very pleasing
and it’s fun to just let it auto-clean-up the board and freeing up usable cards
Hey! Is there an iOS for mobile available? I would loooove it 🫶🏻
There's not, sorry! Maybe in the future ;)
Awww, ok! Thanks tho :)
Absolutely beautiful! 💚 Love the art, the way the menu is implemented, the satisfying sound design - overall a great little game.
I think initially I expected to have the deck shuffle we see often in solitaire, the one that allows you to pull a new card when you gets stuck. But honestly after playing it a few times I think it's even more fun without that feature. It encourages you to try to figure out which move will give you the most progress. Would be nice to have a way to increase the difficulty, but regardless it was pretty fun. I like the start menu idea as well pretty out of the box or in the deck depending on how you want to see it. Well done! And the music is a jam as well! :D
Thanks, glad you enjoy! There's some difficulty scaling presets (as well as the ability to customize them) in the settings menu :) Try 'the suvius special', that's one of our dev's go-to mode
Thanks, will give that mode a go! :D
I enjoy this game so much! This actually got me into playing og solitaire and I'm so thankful for that!
I like too much this game.
It will be perfect in an Android mobile version.
Thank you!
Hey! I absolutely love this game, I just have one pet peeve (and possibly a bug? But that could be just me reading things wrong), and it's cards just automatically sorting themselves once possible. I really enjoy taking my time and that moment of realization when I can start chaining cards together, and that automatic sorting really takes me out of it... I unchecked the "auto cascade" box in the options menu but it keeps happening. Regardless of if it's a bug or not, I thought it'd hopefully be helpful feedback. Still, I can only give you props for making this, the art is amazing and the gameplay is as simple as it's charming, it's right up my alley :)
Thanks so much, glad you enjoy! Yeah, auto-cascade is for automatically moving the remainder of a stack between the free-cells and the board, flipping ascending <--> descending (the gif in last dev log shows it better than I can explain).
I hear you about the auto-stacking, it definitely feels better when you're the one to notice the next card in the chain! That being said, I don't think we can easily add a toggle for that specific behaviour, cause the auto-stacking enforces a nuanced rule with "locking-in" stacks starting from A unless you have enough other free-cells to "unstack" yourself. It unfortunately wouldn't be easy to replicate with manual stacking, but I'll add it to the idea list in case we decide to add more games modes in the future x)
Hey I've noticed an issue where at times the screen or sometimes single elements will bug out. They'll like, flicker and stuff. Refreshing, leaving the site, and restarting my device doesn't seem to help.
Try downloading! It could be a browser-specific issue that we don't have control over