oonsoo: Hanafuda Solitaire for X Windows (1994)
Oonsoo is is a solitaire/patience game involving Hanafuda cards. The objective is to sort each of the twelve suits in order, such that each foundation has a single suit/season. As you play, you can deal an additional row of cards until all cards are eventually in play. In this regard, it is somewhat similar to Spider solitaire. If unfamiliar with Hanafuda cards, the game also has a handy reference screen.
Oonsoo was written by Bradford W. Mott with Seunghee Lee in 1994. Per the announcement file, it is supported on Linux 2.x.x, Ultrix 4.3, HP-UX 9.0 and Solaris. There was, at one point, a web site for the game, which is now only available thanks to the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20050423175305/http://www.redlinelabs.com:80/oonsoo/).
I am having difficulty finding any information about the original solitaire game: did it exist prior to its software implementation? The only web results I can find are of this exact game, PySolFC, and a mobile port. If there is a non-English name for it, I can’t seem to find it from the English one. If anyone knows more, please fill me in!
This video shows an unsuccessful session playing Oonsoo. The variant in XPat2 is easier.
See the article on my web site (https://zerker.ca/home/oonsoo.html) for the original quality video, as well as where to get the game and how to run it.
by Ryan Armstrong
linux foundation
