The Zachtronics Solitaire Collection is really good???
| The final boss
I'm extremely late to the game on this one, but the mobile version of the solitaire collection was released recently and it's really good? I played and beat each of the "minigame" solitaires once, liked a couple enough to play them again (Shenzhen Solitaire in particular really interested me), but then I got to the Fortune's Foundation, the Hard-Mode Tarot Solitaire and, uhhhhh... let's just say it got a hold of me.
I spent a week or so playing it occasionally, struggling and resetting early a bunch. I got about 8 wins over that time but didn't really understand it.
Then on Thursday it just clicked. 15 wins. 20 wins. 29, 36, 40...
This shit is goooooooood.
I played a bunch of solitaire when I was younger, but it's fair to say I've never thought about a solitaire as much as this one. It just hits the sweet spot of requiring attention but occasionally just being an easy deal. You can still screw up the easy ones, but once you learn to spot the standard pitfalls - overconsolidating, creating knotted piles, throwing away empty spaces - it becomes very natural while remaining a challenge on less perfect deals. I'm typically not a fan of move-1-card solitaire modes, but I'm very glad I didn't hit the settings option for "move stacks" because I think it would have ruined this game for me.
My 39th win had no cards put away for the first 10 minutes or so - this was a shot at my first 3-win-streak, so I agonised over the moves only making a few dozen in this time. Everything was tied up under their partner cards. Eventually, I had a couple of large stacks primed to go, but almost all of the trigger cards (2s, 3s, high and low major arcana) were at the bottom of the piles. For a good 15 further minutes, I painstakingly untied this gordian knot, moving 3-4 cards at a time just to get access to more space, then before I was aware it was happening, the knot fell to pieces as if Alexander the Great had got his sword involved, all the hard parts cleanly severed and it was a formality to finish.
I'm talking like this about a Solitaire game.
Anyway I highly recommend the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection if you enjoy puzzles, or just have ever enjoyed solitaire. It's much better to chill out to than a clicker or match-3, and there's a real sense of satisfaction in learning to spot the core patterns that make them up. Even if the hardest game mode doesn't appeal, there are many other easier (and shorter!) modes.