Cardfun: Canfield

Cardfun: Canfield is a solitaire game from Wyvern Studios and is part of their Cardfun range.

Canfield is a solitaire game which originated in New York and was played in casinos in the 1890’s. When played with casino rules, i.e. no undo / redo and going through the deck three cards at a time, it is quite hard to win but with the use of an undo function some sources claim a success rate of over 30% and with unlimited passes through the deck and turning over one card at a time success rates approaching 90% have been claimed.

This game was sold separately and it was also part of Wyvern’s Solitaire Fun package. It has an autoplay function, options to play the owner's CD or MIDI music, change the card back, use larger card numbers & two kinds of scoring,it has an undo function and games can be saved.

The game starts with the game dealing five cards, four cards are available for the player to use and the fifth becomes the first foundation card. The foundation card is important because it's value determined the value of the foundations for the remaining three suits, so if the card turned up was the ten of clubs the player could not start building piles of hearts, diamonds and spades until they had the ten of those suits. Once a foundation card has been played cards are added to it in sequence so in our example the jack would go on the ten, queen on the jack, king on the queen, ace on the king, two on the ace and so-on finishing with the nine.
If any of the four face-up cards can be added to a foundation the player does so filling in the space with a card from the top of the deck. The player then goes through the deck playing cards to the foundations wherever possible.
This game allows the player to work through the deck either looking at every third card or every card.

The shareware version of the game only allows a limited number of games before the player is required to register.