June 10, 2026
Solitaire, but make it chaotic
Klondike Solitaire game for curses in 5k of C
Tiny card game sends coders into nostalgia, jokes, and a mini language war
TLDR: A programmer crammed Klondike Solitaire into a tiny C program for a long-running code contest, and readers loved the retro flex. The comments quickly spiraled into jokes about modern software bloat, AI-made bugs, and programmers arguing over how code should even look.
A programmer squeezed Klondike Solitaire—yes, the classic card game that ate office hours in the Windows 3.1 era—into under 5 kilobytes of C for the famously weird International Obfuscated C Code Contest. That alone is catnip for retro-computing fans, but the real fireworks came from the crowd, who turned a neat coding stunt into a full-on comments-section variety show.
The loudest reaction was pure disbelief. One commenter basically spoke for the modern internet with, “I thought games need GPU acceleration and React? How is this possible?” That set the tone: half amazement, half playful roast of today’s bloated software. Then came the classic programmer one-upmanship. One person jumped in with a very C-language joke about how the “!=” operator is unnecessary because subtraction is enough—exactly the kind of nerdy hot take that makes outsiders blink and insiders cackle. Meanwhile, a Rust fan rolled in to say they built their own solitaire after getting annoyed by a friend’s LLM-written buggy version, turning the thread into a subtle old-school-vs-AI showdown.
There was also wholesome energy under the snark. Another user dropped a link to a playable terminal solitaire, while one admirer said the project was so cool it inspired them to finally try entering the obfuscated-code contest themselves. So yes, this is a story about a tiny card game—but the comments made it a referendum on modern software bloat, coding style, AI-generated bugs, and everyone’s lingering emotional attachment to Solitaire.
Key Points
- •Oscar Toledo G. wrote about creating a Klondike Solitaire game in C as an entry for the 29th International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
- •The 2026 IOCCC rules cited in the article set a maximum source size of 4,993 bytes and 2,503 printable characters, with iocccsize used for checking compliance.
- •The article explains obfuscated C by comparing a conventional loop with a more condensed, less readable version.
- •Toledo chose Klondike Solitaire based on prior experience writing solitaire implementations, including versions for his own operating system and for Intellivision consoles.
- •The game uses the curses library, color, and Unicode symbols in a terminal UI, and the interface was simplified to Tab for selection and Space for dropping cards to meet size limits.