Friday - by Friedemann Friese

I had never played the physical version before, so I was coming in as a newbie with this app. The game itself is definitely one of the best solo card games out there. It’s excellent. It’s also very challenging, and it takes quite a while to figure out how to win, even on the easy level (which isn’t exactly easy). Plus some luck is involved as with all solitaire games, so things have to line up right for you to win. If you’ve played the game before, you’ll figure out the app easier than someone like me who didn’t know how to play. Even then, it’ll take you a few plays before you figure out the UI, as even with the limited help the UI is not intuitive. If you haven’t played the game before, you’ll have to watch videos online and visit some game user forums. That was the only way I could figure out how to play. That’s why I docked one star; there is no real tutorial. Still, now that I figured it all out, it was worth it. This is a very cool game. I lose way more than win, even on easy, but it’s still very fun to play, and it feels really satisfying when you do win. Thank you developer for making this game and also monetizing it fairly with no ads or IAP. That’s rare nowadays and very, very much appreciated. I highly recommend this game with caveats about the UI learning curve. Stick with it. You’ll end up loving this game.

I enjoyed the physical card game. This implementation captures all the fun with none of the mess of setting up, tracking life with tokens, and putting it all away. It is just as challenging as the original but you can whip through the games to put your losses behind you. I have encountered a couple scenarios where I tried to take ab illegal action. Usually it recovers, but at the end of the game once (I was losing to the final pirate and tried to cheat) it hung the game. But otherwise it is smooth gameplay that tries hard not to let you forget to take advantage of your potential on the board.

The overall game is great, but I prefer the digital version. There’s some oddities to the UI and rules that make it different from playing with real cards. There’s strange additions that don’t exist in the original rulebook that make the game mostly just more annoying to play. When using certain abilities and then later using a card that removes that card from the play area, that causes the ability to be undone. This is not a rule present in the physical rulebook and drastically limits your potential. A worse change is that you lose the game if you make your deck too efficient and capable of drawing through the whole deck. In the original rulebook it specifically says that you continue playing as normal without gaining new bad effects from shuffling once you’ve used up all the bad effects. I do not know why this change was made, but it did not improve the game, in my opinion. The inability to play with the original rules, which I think were pretty much perfect, makes this game sort of undesirable for me to play. The change for losing makes the game too random, because you can’t easily strategize around accidentally making your deck too good.