click-outside-the-box 0.1.0

register and replay clicks for online card gaming

This program can help you gain a high score on Arkadium's klondike register and replay clicks, fast, and halting the clock in between registering. It might also work for other online games for which the clock can be halted by clicking-outside-the-box.

This program allows you to register where you would click, by hovering the mouse above the postion where you would and then pressing the 'f' key (this is clearly laid out for me being a right handed mouse user). Once you have the sequence that you want you press the 'r' and the sequence of positions is replayed from the beginning with clicks. Of course there bit more involved, but not much.

Background

Games like Arkadium's Klondike (also available on Washington Post's website), allow you to play card-games in your webbrowser by clicking cards, new positions for those cards, or drag and drop. The following may apply to other games with similar characteristics.

Klondike is a game that is played by clicking cards displayed in seven columns, and bringing them to a new position, either by dragging them there or activating the card and clicking on the new position. The actual rules/restrictions are indicated on the website.

Whether or not you can finish a particular game depends on how lucky you were with how the cards were shuffled by the computer. Some games cannot be solved at all, others require multiple times going through the "deck" because of the order.

Even if you follow an optimal strategy, it is difficult to approach the highscore and you'll be stuck with around 1230 point. That is until you realise the timer, which influences the score, stops when clicking outside the green playing area. So by clicking direclty outside this area after you moved a card, you can get your score up to around 1265 (at least I could).

This clicking-outside-the-box, allows you to think about what you are doing, requires concentration on top of the solving strategy and luck. A second or two are easily lost by a mouse button that is released too early, making a fun game rather stressful. Because some deck orderings inherently require more card movements you might have to play 10 to 15 times to get close to your high-score. That repeat clicking might also give you CTS earlier than leasurely playing.

Cheating

Is clicking outside of the box cheating? IMO yes, but given the scores that you see on Arkadium and the Washington Post webiste, a lot of people do that. Using a program that does so is automatically cheating as well, but is it more cheating? At least using the progam levels the playing field by bringing Klondike back to a bit of luck in the deck, a good solving strategy.

You don't have to use it, just like you don't have to click outside the box to enjoy the game. But if you wonder how some people are able to solve klondike with a score that requires only 50 seconds of moving cards around, where you require at least the double amount of time: this is how they do it.

Installation

click_outside_the_box requires an actively maintained Python 3 verison. I recommend using the latest stable version but 3.7 should still work.

Create a virtual environment and install the program from PyPI:

python3 -m venv --copies --upgrade-deps /opt/util/cotb
/opt/util/cotb/bin/pip install click-outside-the-box

The only direct dependency is pyautogui, but that can pull in quite a few other libraries depending on your platform, use a virtual environment (you have been warned).

The program has been developed and tested under macOS (Macbook M1), but probably should run under Linux and Windoze.

How to play a game

One time actions per "session"

• Open the browser to Klondike and select one card mode. Repeat until you have 7 open cards that allow for some moving, maybe including some aces.
• In a terminal program start /opt/util/cotb/bin/click-outside-the-box
• The terminal will clear, without a prompt
• With the mouse still above the terminal window, press 'z' (i.e. the lowercase) Z. This registers the postion of the terminal screen.
• However the mouse over the webbrowser (don't click!), a few pixels above the green playing area, somewhere in the white, and press 'x'
• Finally howver the mouse over the word Score on the green area and press 'Shift+x' (i.e. uppercase X)

The program saves the positions in a file, so you only have to redo this when you move not the windows. You don't have to repeat this if you minimized any of the windows in between and restored them to the same position, restarted the program, or any other intermediate action that doesn't affect the three positions so selected, you don't have to redo them.

exiting the progam

At any time you can quit the program by pressing shift-Q. The terminal window will be restored.

moving cards

The game doesn't do drag-and-drop, cards are move by first selecting them (hover above the card and press 'f'), then selecting the target destination (the card or area which it can be placed), each of these clicks is a seperate action. After that press r to have the program replay those actions with real clicks, real fast. When you use this, make sure:

• that the terminal window is selected so it can receives the keys pressed
• that you don't click the webbrowser window (if you do, just re-activate the terminal)
• that you don't move the mouse until the sequence of actions have been excuted

There is no limit to the amount of actions that you can register, and by carefully noting where a card will come after a previous action, you can hover above the new location and "select" a card that has not arrived yet.

wrong action

If you ever lose track of what you did, press 'c' to clear the replay action list and start over

Example

Lets assume have a newly dealt klondike game and the left-most open cards are ♡3 ♡k (on top of 1 undisclosed card) and ♠4 (on top of two disclosed cards). Only looking at these cards you could:

• hover above ♡3 and press 'f', hover above ♠4 and press 'f'
• hover above ♡K and press 'f', hover where ♡3 used to be and press 'f'
• hover above the deck in the upper right and press 'f'
• press 'r'

Turning the topmost card of the deck could have been done earlier, at any time except not between selecting a card and it destination. If you put a card on another card that is not on the stack at the top right, and want to move it away, please make amends for the moved card not fully covering the card that was already there.