Montana, the game:

Montana, the rules:

Montana is a pretty simple solitaire-type card game, but a highly effective time waster, nonetheless. You have been warned... :)

The goal of the game is to organize the cards by suite and number into neat little rows, one suite per row and cards of the suite in ascending order from left to right, for example:
    hearts: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K
    diamonds: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K
    etc.

You can move cards only into the empty slots. The card you can put into an empty slot must be in the same suite and one number higher in order than the card on the left side of the empty slot. If the empty slot is on the leftmost column, you can move any 2 card into it. K cards are the highest cards, so if there's a K to the left of an empty slot, you can't move any card in that slot.

You can move the cards by simply clicking on them with the mouse. The clicked card will not move, if it doesn't "fit" into any of the empty slots, and you will get an error message about it too. If the clicked card does fit into an empty slot, it will jump there and it's former position will become an empty slot. There's also the "Undo" button, which undoes (only) your last move when clicked. Note that the button doesn't undo a shuffle (see below).

Eventually you will get stuck, when all the empty slots end up "in front of" the K cards. At that point you can click the "Shuffle" button which a) locks already correctly organized cards (e.g. hearts 2 3 4 etc) and b) shuffles the rest of the cards (hopefully :) enabling you to continue organizing the cards again. You can shuffle the cards only twice.

If, once you've used all your shuffles, you get stuck again, you will have no other option than to end the game by clicking the "End game" button. Or you can end the game any time you want with the same button. When the game is ended, you will be given your score, which basically is the number of cards you managed to lock into correct places (e.g. "15 out of 48 cards"). I can tell you that the maximum score is not at all easy to achieve...

That's about it. Pretty simple game once you get the hang of it, but as I said, it can be addictive and you can end up wasting a lot of your free (and working...) time in pursuit of the perfectly organized table of cards and the maximum score. I did. :)

P.S. Don't bother clicking on the "Montana by -MiS-" button, it's just trying make the browser go to my old web site, which hasn't existed for over half a decade. But I guess you clicked on it anyway and found that out the hard way... People never RTFM... =) I should remove the button, but as I said, I haven't changed the applet for half a decade and I can't be bothered to change it just to remove that one button.

P.P.S. If the applet gets mixed up in updating itself (e.g only part of the card table is redrawn and the rest of the table/cards being invisible), you need to reload the page, but unfortunately you will also lose your ongoing game as the applet resets itself back to the start. It's a "feature" of the game. :) Best way to avoid that situation is not to scroll the page or cover the applet with another window while you're playing. So, read the instructions first, memorize them by heart, shutdown all other applications (so they can't suddenly pop up any windows in your face) and just concentrate on the game. As I said, this is a feature of the game, designed to maximize your commitment to playing Montana and ignoring everything else... =)