CounterStack

The game

Five forces in a perfect loop — Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Savant: each force beats two of the others and loses to the remaining two. Every card played must defeat the card beneath it, so each capture is a commitment about the captures that follow — one wrong move early is a dead end you discover five moves later.

The daily shuffle is the same for every player in the world, and it ships only after a solver has proven a perfect clear exists. The game never deals an unwinnable board; the only variable is you.

Worth a closer look

• Solver-verified fairness as a design stance: "close" means something when perfection is guaranteed reachable.
• Five forces is the sweet spot: the two-win, two-loss symmetry keeps every hand live in a way three forces never can.
• Designed to leave the screen: the five forces are becoming a physical 50-card deck — the digital daily is the proving ground for a tabletop system.

How it plays

1. Read the deal. The stacks are open information — what beats what is the whole strategic texture.
2. Sequence your captures so every card you play defeats the one beneath it and the chain never strands a force you still need.
3. Clear everything for a perfect. The solver figures shown are reference, not autoplay — they tell you how close your line came to the proven one.

Six modes, one grammar

The daily solitaire is the front door; the other modes rework the same five-force grammar into different pressures. The loop is balanced by construction — a pentagram of forces in which no force is privileged — which is what makes the game teachable in one sentence and still deep in the tenth play.

From four suits to five forces

Every classic solitaire — Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Nertz — is built on the same substrate: four suits and thirteen ranks with no relationships between them. The only logic a designer can reach for is rank order and colour alternation, and after two hundred years that vein is mined out. Counterstack replaces the substrate: five forces in which every card beats two and loses to two, so capture logic exists at the level of the card itself — and a whole new family of solitaire becomes constructible at a kitchen table with one deck.

The system underneath

The five forces are engineered as a grammar, not a theme. Each-beats-two, loses-to-two is the smallest symmetric non-transitive system in which every matchup stays live — and it holds for any five forces: swap the icons and the mathematics is untouched. What ships on this page is one game built on that grammar; what was designed is the grammar itself.

That is the bet the digital daily exists to prove. The same system is engineered to leave the screen as a physical 50-card deck carrying a family of games: high-speed simultaneous play in the Nertz tradition, force precedence doubling as a fair first-player decider for other tabletop sets, and a Texas Hold’em variant — in development as a Counterstack mode — in which hands read through force relationships rather than rank alone. The daily you can play today is the proving ground; the deck is what the engineering was designed around.

The daily

One deal a day, identical worldwide — comparing lines with a friend is the point. Scores measure your play, not your luck, because a perfect clear is always provably there.