Solitary Fun For One (Solitaire (PC))

Member Name: sersha

Product:	Solitaire (PC)
Date:	27/08/04 (243 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: time waster, free on most PCs, easy to pla

Disadvantages: can be frustrating!

I used to worry about my boss walking past my computer in case he noticed that I was playing the odd game of solitaire. That was until one particular week when he was snowed under with work, and we were all depending on him to clear his backlog in order that we could all get on. I took him some coffee and because it had been raining and my shoes were drying on the radiator, he didn't hear me approach with it. I thought I would find him with his head buried in a pile of papers, stressing out about something. But he was sitting in his office, muching some chocolate and playing minesweeper, and there was no point in him trying to hide it from me as he knew full well I had seen him. So now when I have a stressful moment, I play a little game of solitaire without any semblance of guilt and try to get everything else into perspective.

There are lots of reasons why I keep coming back to it. It's free, I don't have to go online to access it, it only takes ten minutes which is perfect for a little stress break, and it's timeless -for some reason no matter how much I play it, it never bores me. It's very addictive though, and if I find I can't complete a game, I can't resist beginning a new one until I finally get one to work out. So the ten minutes does sometimes stretch to twenty...

This solitaire is the card game, not the one with the pegs and the holes. It's the one I used to play with real cards, as a child, when my big sister refused point blank to play board games with me. She was happy enough to let me be her pony and do a showjumping course in the garden over poles and buckets (thankfully this horse didn't need a rider), but when it came to monopoly she wasn't having any of it. I was had!

There aren't many satisying games to play on your own as a child on a rainy day, as most card games and board games involve at least two players. So there's probably some deeply buried childhood comfort that
I still get from this particular game.

It's not at all complicated to play. You have seven piles of cards. Each has the lowest card face up, and the others face down, and the number of cards in each pile starts at one on the left, through to 7 on the right. The remaining cards stay face down in a pile and are revealed three at a time. You must access these cards in order, so to get to the second you must already have moved the first. You can only move red cards onto black ones and vice versa, and threes onto fours, fours onto fives, and so on numerically.

The ultimate goal is to move all the cards into four piles to sort them by suit, beginning with the aces and working up to the kings. Once all the cards are on the piles, you get jumping stacks of cards which bounce around your screen: in the seventies, that was clever graphics!

To spice things up a bit, there are a few variatiosn on the game. You can deal the cards one at a time from the main pack instead of three at a time. Or you can play "Vegas" which means not only do you score in dollars rather than points (oooh the excitement) but you can only deal the main pack once. Then its gone. It's far far too hard to make the pack come out when you play this way and you'll end up there for hours, so if you want to keep your job, I'd stick to the Standard gameplay. Otherwise you might as well go the whole hog and bring Sim City to work to install in your lunch hour, and be done with it!

You can also change the pictures on the backs of the cards. This is something I remember vividly from sneaking onto my fathers computer to play solitaire, aged about 8. We had a secret joke: he liked the pack with pictures of clouds and I liked the fish, so I always changed it around when I played as I knew it irritated him. He always changed it back again. I was only about 8, but solitaire was a fun game even at that age, and it doesn't lose it's appeal as you get o
lder. Truly timeless.

I've been addicted for about 20 years...

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