Solitaire by MobilityWare+

I’m not sure how this game is so highly rated. It starts out fun but as you get ranked higher and higher the game becomes more rigged. The card distribution doesn’t feel random. I frequently get starting layouts with heavy clustering (for example, several cards of the same rank showing while the connecting cards are nowhere to be found). It gives the impression that the deals are engineered for difficulty rather than naturally shuffled. Sometimes I just want to play a quick easy game but the levels are often really difficult because of how rigged they feel. There’s are game events that last a few days where you win random “prizes” but the prizes are lame. There one reoccurring event where you collect puzzle pieces for each completed game and after you get enough pieces you can build the puzzle. The puzzles are just random weird pictures. Like during the holidays they are themed to that holiday, But they keep doing Christmas pictures all the way through February. If that’s not lame enough, the same pictures repeat every year. You can’t do anything with the pictures, they just sit in a section that you can go and look at but they are only the size of a thumbnail. It would be better if you could win something you can use like new deck pictures or backgrounds or something.

I love solitaire and have been playing some form of it ever since I was a young teenager. I even have an older version of this company's Solitaire that I've played to death in the past. I love the addition of events in this version, with the exception of the event deals that want me to often solve a deal in 1 minute. Never once have I ever been able to solve a deal in the required time, likely due to both my ADHD and learning disabilities. I play solitaire because I find it enjoyable and relaxing. As a result, I find the inability to avoid timed deals extremely frustrating. More than once, I've started a timed deal, not realizing its timed, only to be interrupted because I wasn't fast enough. I'm never fast enough and it is incredibly frustrating to have to hit retry two or more times to exit out of the timed games. I would really appreciate the option to avoid timed deals as a result. The timed deals truly ruin the experience for me, every single time.

This is overall a pretty great version of Klondike solitaire. It’s simple with opt-in “mini games”, I guess you’d call them, that are easy to ignore if you’re not into that sort of thing (I’m not…I don’t need to build a jigsaw when I just want to zone out playing cards). You’re also able to customize your visuals, and they include some of the classic card backs from Windows 3.1, so it’s nice to be able to get that nostalgia hit. My only real complaint is that it has a pop-up hint prompt that I can’t seem to disable, even after checking every box to turn off proactive hints. Literally just putting the phone down for a minute will prompt a pop-up with a stupid crying king and patronizing message that it looks like I’m “struggling”. No, dude, I just needed both my hands for something else! It has a particularly bad habit of popping up when there’s no available moves, offering to show me the solution which presumably means it would start over and make a different choice than I did at some point, but at that point I’m content with simply making a new deal. If it weren’t for that, it would be an easy 5 star rating.