ZapMatch Solitaire HELP

Game uses standard deck of playing cards including 2 jokers.

OBJECT: To get lowest possible score.

GAME PLAY:

GAME ENDS: When all cards have been drawn from draw pile and there are no more playable cards in your hand.

STRATEGY: Choosing which cards to play and in what order is what the game is all about. If you were able to play ALL cards in your hand each round then you could get a ZERO score. But sometimes it is better to leave a few cards in your hand so as to have more choices the next round. But this can increase your score. Jokers can save your game - but when should you play them? You may not want to play them too soon. But meanwhile the scores are adding up fast.

Remember - Getting the next set of 5 cards does NOT increase your score by 5 points - but it increases your score by the total number of cards in your hand. If you never played a single card you would end with a score of 275. If you were able to clear all 5 cards in your hand each round you would end with a perfect score of 0.

WHAT'S MY RANKING:
Under 10Awesome!Lightning strikes! You should have bought a lottery ticket.
10 - 19GreatLuck, good choices, and jokers. 15 is the best I've ever done.
20 - 29GoodStaying below 30 puts you in the top of the class.
30 - 39Average 
40 plusFairYou can do better.

GAME CREDITS: I want to let everyone know that I "play-glarized" this game. A gentleman from Iceland (Einar Egilsson) created a javascript library (cards.js) and an example game to demonstrate how to use the library. He made the library available to anyone who wanted to use it under what is called a MIT license. His original example dealt 5 cards to both the dead hand at top of screen and to the player hand. Cards could be drawn 1 at a time from the draw pile and player's hand could be moved to discard pile if the card matched either suit or face value. I wanted to see how hard it would be to use the cards.js engine for a different game, and so decided to modify his example. I changed top deal to only 3 cards, changed draw pile pull to 5 cards at a time, added logic to allow use of jokers, added scoring logic, added logic to require game to start before being able to get cards from draw pile, added end of game check with final score ranking message, added random comments during game play, and finally, added a help page (you're looking at it). Decided the resulting game was kind of fun to play and that the scoring piece added goal to shoot for. So I then decided to make the game available to you. You can use the link at the bottom of the game page to visit Einar's website. You can also visit Nicu Buculei's website (Nicu created the card images).