Gaps

Gaps is a Macintosh shareware solitaire game by Thomas Reed that implements the patience variant also known as Montana or Addiction. All cards are dealt into four rows, the Aces are removed, and the player must line up each suit from 2 to King by sliding cards into the holes left by the Aces -- easy to learn, notoriously hard to win.

How it plays

After the deal, only the card one rank higher than the card to the left of a gap (and of the same suit) may slide into that gap. Twos can move into any gap at the start of a row. After two reshuffles, any cards still out of place are reshuffled around the cards already in their correct positions, giving the player a fresh chance without erasing progress.

Versions

The 3.1 archive ships in two builds: Gaps Carbon, which runs natively under Mac OS X (and on Mac OS 9 with CarbonLib), and Gaps Classic, which targets Mac OS 8.1 and later on 68k or PowerPC hardware. Both builds share the same rules, layout, and reshuffle behavior.

Companion releases

Gaps is part of a small family of solitaire titles by Thomas Reed in the Info-Mac archive, sitting alongside the related Gaps 3.1 X (Carbon-only) entry. Both are written for the Mac shareware audience of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Distribution

Gaps is freeware/shareware distributed through Info-Mac and the author's email contact (thomasareed@earthlink.net), with no install dependencies beyond a supported Mac OS release. The clean, minimal interface mirrors traditional Mac solitaire conventions of the era.