The Best Palm Solitaire Games
May 16 '02
The Bottom Line I love playing all sorts of games on my Palm, but several of my absolute favorites are solitaire games. Here are my choices for best Palm solitaire games.
I spend a lot of time playing games on my Palm. Although I enjoy all different types of games, my absolute favorites are all solitaire variants. Card games are particularly well suited for Palms since they don't generally need extremely complicated graphics (like many arcade games), require complicated AI opponents (like other card games or board games), or demand game elements adhere to complex motions calculated on the fly (like many pinball and other games). Not that there aren't excellent Palm games in all of those other genres too. But card games are simple and work particularly well.
To be considered for my list a game must be a card game (played with a real deck of cards) that you can play without an opponent. There are solitaire dice and tile games that don't require opponents and some excellent solitaire card games that don't use a standard deck, but I have decided to make this a purist list and only consider real card games. In my opinion these solitaire games are the best of the best:
* BlackJack Solitaire
* TenPin Solitaire
* Accordion Solitaire
* Patience
* Darn It!
BlackJack Solitaire
BlackJack Solitaire from Seahorse Software is my favorite Palm game. The premise is simple: make the best five blackjack hands without busting. You must score 95 points, or average 19 in each hand, for a round to count as a scoring round. To make life a little harder, you must race against the clock, gaining precious bonus points for finishing rounds quickly.
Offering both easy and hard variations as well as six levels of play, BlackJack Solitaire meets the gaming needs of many different players. The easy levels start you with an empty board allowing you to place cards anywhere. The hard levels automatically place one card in each hand, thus limiting the viable placements of later cards. The levels of play further alter the rules, allowing either practice (non-scoring) play, unlimited games where you play until you either bust or fail to make the requisite 95 points in a round, and four levels of three round games. The first two levels provide 30 seconds of game time per round while the latter two provide 20 seconds. One level of each duration shows the current value of each hand while one does not.
Seahorse hosts a global high score table for each of the 10 non-practice levels so you can see where you stand against the best BlackJack Solitaire players in the world. BlackJack Solitaire is a lot of fun, well worth the $5 asking price, but one word of warning: it's highly addictive. Don't say I didn't warn you.
TenPin Solitaire
TenPin Solitaire from Alien Hunter is one of the most unusual card games I've played. Structured like a bowling game with ten cards lined up like bowling pins and three piles of cards to the side, you get two balls per frame to remove cards. The first ball turns over the top card in each of the three piles. You remove pins by adding two or more adjacent cards' values together and matching this to a card in one of the three piles. Only the value of the ones digit matters, so 6 and 8 would be matched by a 4. The second ball is rolled when no more cards can be matched initially. The roll discards the top card in each of the three piles and turns over the next card in each pile. You get a strike for removing all pins with the first ball and a spare for removing them in two rolls.
TenPin keeps a local high score table but there's no way to match scores against the best of the best. TenPin isn't as addictive as BlackJack Solitaire but it's still a lot of fun and worth playing, particularly since it's free.
Accordion Solitaire
Accordion Solitaire also from Seahorse Software is a surprisingly difficult game based on a Mac game of the same name. It's a devilishly difficult game to win, by far the hardest to win of any Palm solitaire game I've played. The statistics track winning percentage to the thousandth of a percent and every digit is needed.
Initially 13 cards are dealt face up in a row, or actually into one of three patterns representing a single row on the Palm. The rest of the cards become the draw pile and are added to the rightmost end as other cards are removed. Basically, you match cards of the same suit or the same value that are either next to each other or separated by one other card. The leftmost card of the matched pair is removed, the right card of the pair replaces it, the other cards in the line move to the left filling empty slots, and the top card of the draw pile fills the rightmost spot maintaining a row size of 13 until there are less than 13 cards left in play. If you can remove all but one card you win.
Accordion Solitaire can be depressing if you're the type of person who really cannot take losing. I'm not exaggerating the need to calculate the winning percentage to the thousandth of a percent - you will not win very often at all. If you can handle the poor odds of winning it's a great deal of fun, and well worth the $5 price.
Patience
Patience by Keith Packard is a simple collection of 15 different solitaire games. Offering minimal graphics and configuration, it's not the most robust game in existence, but it has faithful ports of some of the more popular solitaire variants out there. A few of the games are too poorly presented to play - most notably Montana - but most are presented well enough to play with ease.
Patience includes the following games: Aces High, Golf, Vegas, Canfield, Klondike, Wish, Calculation, Montana, Tabby Cat, Eight Off, Spider, Towers, Freecell, Spiderette, and Yukon. Canfield and Calculation are particular favorites of mine.
Although you can find shareware standalone versions of many of these games, having them all in one small application with one standard interface and (for the most part) one standard deck of cards is nice. Plus this collection is free whereas you'd have to pay for most of the separate versions.
Darn It!
Darn It! by Darren Butler is a really frustrating game that earned its name. Played on a 4x4 grid, the object of the game is to place the four kings in the corners of the grid, the four queens in the vertical edge slots, and the four jacks in the horizontal edge slots.
The cards start in a face-down pile. One card is turned up and must be placed on the grid before the next card can be shown. If it is a face card, by default it will automatically fill any available slots in either the diagonals, vertical edges, or horizontal edges as appropriate. If no slot is available the game is over. If not a face card, you must place it on an empty grid slot of your choosing.
When the grid is full, you must start removing non-face cards in pairs adding to ten regardless of suit. Tens can be removed by themselves. If no cards can be removed, the game is over. Once all available pairs are removed, you fill the empty slots with the next cards from the pile, then remove cards again. The game continues until you cannot place a face card (you lose), until all slots are filled and no pairs are present (you lose), or until all face cards have been placed and all other cards removed (you win).
Although not nearly as difficult to win as Accordion, Darn It! is not an easy game. It's quite dependent on luck, moreso than many of the other games on my list of favorites. It's also slightly more expensive at $7. Still, it's a lot of fun and worth at least trying. Even though it's on the difficult side and relies less on skill than luck, Darn It! is another one of those frustratingly addictive games that make you want to start a new game the instant the old one ends.
Other Solitaire Games
There are many other great solitaire games for the Palm including many more from my favorite company, Seahorse Software. Browse PalmGear and Handango and get a feel for the great variety of games out there. Even if the five games I've highlighted don't appeal to you I'm sure something out there will.
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