Spider Solitaire

Like most solitaires you play black on red or a color on itself,in descending numerical order. The object is to get a string from King down to Ace all of the same suit,at which point you can discard the string. Winning obviously means all cards get discarded.

The kicker is that when you have finished all moves for one turn, you have to slap down ten new cards across the array, totally obliterating all your careful strategies.

You can play this demon game at http://www.idiotsdelight.net/spider.html. The game is easier if you use the options to lower the number of cards in the stack and to "allow unfilled spaces."

Spider Solitaire has (at least until I discovered e2) for me been the most effective of these procrastination tools. The 500+ total games in my statistics prove this, and that doesn't count a lot of the games that I've lost since I figured out a way to get around recording losses. You accomplish this by simply choosing yes when it asks to save your game. It's a lot easier than the Freecell trick (which involves crashing the program).

In Microsoft's version of the game, there are three difficulty levels in which the sole difference is the number of suits available. On easy, there is only one suit, on medium there are two, and on difficult there are all four (yikes!).

Microsoft computes a score by starting at 500 and subtracting one point for each move you make, and adding 100 whenever you get all the cards from king down to ace (of the same suit) in order down a column. In each difficulty level there are a total of 8 sets of king through ace (that is, on difficult there are 2 sets for each suit, on medium the two suits have 4 sets each) totaling 104 cards.

My personal stats reflect pretty well the difference in difficulty levels:

Easy: 88% wins, 1210 high score (90 moves)
Medium: 65% wins, 1185 high (115 moves)
Difficult: 34% wins, 1135 high (165 moves)