What Makes a Solitaire Game?

A love letter to a surprisingly deep and interesting genre

Of the games that can rightly claim to be the most installed/played computer games of all time, solitaire is the most humble.

People will write breathless articles espousing the beauty and virtue of Tetris. Minesweeper is a fascinating exploration of of what a P-NP hard problem is, incapsulated in a fascinating gem of an experience.

Solitaire? I mean it’s something to do if you have time to kill?

Which is ironic, because of all three the of the games, Solitaire has the longest and most fascinating "coaching tree”¹ of all of them.

New Releases

Two incredibly charming solitaire games have come out this month that are worth talking about in their own right: Solitomb by Jakub Wasilewski and Cavern Shuffle by Gravy Boat Games.

They are a pair of new solitaire style games, one digital and one physical, released just in time for the holidays when you might want some relaxing time to yourself:

What you might not expect though, is just how deep the Solitaire-well runs. I’m going to walk through exactly what makes a solitaire game, just what I find so interesting about Solitomb and Cavern Shuffle, and make a few recommendations about other highlights of the genre that might be worth checking out.

Let’s go shuffling!

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My First Solitaire Experience

One of my earliest memories of computer games in general (much less playing them) is Freecell. My dad loved Freecell. As far as I can tell he no longer plays anymore, preferring to spend his time on word games like Connections and Wordle.

But back then, when options weren’t so plentiful. Freecell was the place to be. He tracked his successes and failures in an Excel spreadsheet. Sorting his way through the various shuffles of the deck.

My dad isn’t someone you would call a gamer. He’s played a few, like Plants vs Zombies or World of Goo.² Which is, for me, what makes solitaire such an interesting design. Zach Gage mentioned during a discussion about his game Cards of Darkness how the concept of solitaire is actually pretty similar to the concept of a roguelike. You have a components (the deck of cards), and the randomization (the shuffle), and the seed (the configuration of the cards and the deck as laid out) and you try to make your way through the challenge created by the randomizer to the best of your ability. Whole play styles have sprung up around the communities of various roguelike games around discovering interesting and especially challenging seeds. And here my dad was doing something similar long before I had even heard of the concept!

Solitaire is one of those games that bridges the gap between people who play hundreds of games and people who play few, without any of the extra bells and whistles.

I think that’s where a lot of the charm and interest in solitaire comes from for many game designers. It’s the type of game that has a lot of the vocabulary of more complex experiences, and it’s the type of game that you can seemingly make infinite tweaks and intrusions with. But for the most part, it’s also the kind of game you can hand to almost anyone and they will be able to at least understand what’s going on. This is, I think (anyway), an intoxicating combination of large player base and a lot of design space to experiment with makes the genre incredibly attractive.

I was more of a Spider Solitaire guy

I’m not actually sure I could tell you from memory how to play Freecell. But I did love Spider Solitaire. Unlike Freecell it was not particularly challenging. At least, the version I played was not, the single suit version. Unlike Klondike solitaire, you’re not trying to put one card up at a time, you have to make an entire run of cards from Ace to King, and then they’ll all go up at once. So the challenge is picking when and where to stack, and whether or not to stack.

I liked playing it for the vibes. Unlike standard solitaire (which I now know is called Klondike), the possibility that you would just get smacked in the face by randomness and disappointingly get stuck without any warning halfway through, Spider Solitaire (especially with one suit) is kind of like a simple lock where all you really need to do is jimmy a lockpick in until it clicks. I really just liked moving the stacks of cards around, to be totally honest.

I think this is what people who talk about game themes miss sometimes. A lot of the “theme” isn’t about the art slapped on the game, it’s the literal motions that players go through when they play. There’s something really fun, relaxing, and mesmerizing about moving stacks of cards around, flipping over other cards until you have all of the cards neatly sorted at the end. It feels nice.

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The Components of a Solitaire Game

But what makes a solitaire game truly a solitaire game? How do you differentiate it from a different single player card game?

I think there are a couple of key components that make something a solitaire style game:

• It’s about ordering and reordering cards in ascending (or descending increments)

• You get some sort of unlock for grouping and ordering cards correctly during the game

• There is hidden information

  • At any given point you might not know exactly the configuration of some component of the game: whether that’s face down cards or cards in the deck

• Suits matter, mostly, kinda

This isn’t to say that every solitaire style game will have these, or won’t have other stuff, but the further away you get from these core concepts, the more likely it is you’re playing something else. And the two games that creep right up to this line but (in my opinion) don’t fit the bill are single player Regicide and For Northwood!

Regicide is a game about defeating kings and queens. You’re not ordering anything, and it’s more about manipulation of the suits and the deck, than it is about trying to make sets of cards. And For Northwood! is a trick taking game. You’re trying to play the odds of what cards are remaining in the deck so you can hit a contract (an agreed upon number of wins). Both are great games, neither are solitaire.

Solitaire is the type of game that feels like it’s about the motions of operating the game as much as it is about the strategy behind each movement. But what’s incredible is just how much strategy you can layer on top while still retaining the heart of the genre.

Cavern Shuffle

Cavern Shuffle is pretty close to a “standard” implementation of Klondike solitaire. If you take away the royal cards and replace them with challenges instead. Basically you’re still trying to get all of the cards sorted into suits, but there will be monsters and traps who require you to have a certain power level (the highest value of a suit or the sum of all of the values) in order to discard. This extra challenge is supposed to change the shape of play in the game.

The production and the artwork is incredibly high quality. Unfortunately from a design perspective the game adds interesting mechanisms but doesn’t do much to resolve the central challenges that make Klondike solitaire a slog. You do a bunch of stuff until you hit roughly the halfway point and then you find yourself in an unwinnable state.

For example, the “Short Rest” card that you start with allows you one free opportunity to reshuffle the deck that hasn’t been dealt. This is helpful, assuming that what you really need is one card that’s buried on the wrong side on a set of 3 somewhere in the pile. But usually, you deploy this about halfway through the game when most of the cards in your deck are already played out and the shuffle doesn’t add much of anything.

And the monsters and traps are also fascinating variations, but they add extra layers of difficulty onto what already was a game that was challenging to get the cards to line up. So the idea behind the boss monster (every time you put a card in the safe pile it moves one space over) is really interesting. But in practice it just kinda means you are hosing yourself. There’s often minimal strategic interplay between waiting to see if you should put the card up, because there’s no penalty for another trip through the deck.

Passing some time playing Cavern Shuffle

However, the biggest saving grace of all of that quality is that I think there’s meat on the bones for you to experiment! Here are three house rules (it’s not cheating, it’s solitaire) that I’ve been experimenting with:

1. When the Minotaur moves, it “kicks” the card in front of it onto the next space. The idea here is that like a megafauna, it dusts up the state of the game exposing new opportunities as it moves along.

2. Allow the short rest to have you take one of the face up non-challenge cards in play and shuffle it into the deck/discard pile. I like this vibe because it feels like a “short rest” and it also gives something to get something. You get to open up new possibilities but you also have the card disappear.

3. Allow monsters to be played into empty spaces in addition to the 10 of a character card. Want to stick a monster somewhere? Go for it, but you’re going to have to creep down that hallway one way or another.

If you try it out, let me know!

Solitomb

So how about Solitomb then? Solitomb is a solitaire game where you are using the suits of cards with swords and shields to build up power and overcome the suits of enemy cards. The setting of the game is you’re an adventurer who’s entered into a pact with a demon. Which is a great setting for a solitaire game because of the various associations with gambling and tarot and the occult.

The vibes on this game are absolutely immaculate.

The rules dispense with a lot of the suit (and number) based structure of traditional solitaire game and focuses on making stacks of cards that are less than or equal to each other. So 3-4-5-5-5 is a valid hand to play. But they still manage to focus on the underlying principle. Eliminating cards and grouping cards in clever ways to end the game and make it to the next level.

There’s also a bunch of smart little touches that make the game better. Defense gets subtracted from high to low, but attack works from low to high. And then if you don’t have enough attack to eliminate enemies, it subtracts the value from the final available card. In a year filled with Balatro and Slice & Dice, this feels like a more than worthy ending.

Is it a Digital Genre?

For a genre so closely associated with physical cards (and the 52 card deck specifically) it might seem strange that most of the examples of recent innovation come from digital games.

There are a couple of examples of great physical solitaire variants. I’ve even written about some!

But the primary problem with physical solitaire is that operating the game can be a real challenge. What Food Chain Island has going for it is that it’s 18 cards. It’s simple and easy to deal out. But for a genre predicated on passing time between other events, shuffling and dealing cards feels like a moment you want to make space for. And if you’re going to do that, why not play a deeper solo experience, or find some friends to play a card game with instead?

The game that has both a physical and digital implementation, Finished! is one I’ve only played digitally:

And it’s lovely to feel the cards whirr by on a digital screen but I wonder if I would feel so enchanted if I were the one having to do the management.

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The Zach Gage of It All

If there’s one designer who somehow manages to make games that are incredibly thoughtful but also I feel comfortable handing to and sharing with anyone, it’s Zach Gage. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he’s also produced three of the better solitaire variations (for phones no less!).

• Sage Solitaire

• Flip Flop Solitaire

• Cards of Darkness

Sage Solitaire asks the question, “what if poker but solitaire?”, Flip Flop Solitaire is “what if we let stacks of cards ascend or descend?” and Cards of Darkness is “what if the decks of cards were actual magical creatures and weapons in a surprisingly deep adventure with incredible art?”.

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Solitaire games fit the aesthetic of old school computing. Just look no further than the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. It’s a group of games that were originally released as add-ons to very computer science-y style games, packaged together as a single unit. Each game plays out like a traditional solitaire game where you’re trying to successfully organize the cards dealt onto the table, but they contain a variety of twists and turns that make them unique and fun to return to time and time again. The pack also features one of the very few times I’ve seen cribbage actually incorporated into another game’s mechanics.

Or, how about the Solitaire Conspiracy, a 2000s spy themed thriller that combines throwback aesthetics with a new solitaire format and fun special powers?

It seems like when people try to imagine excellent computer game design, they think about computations that wouldn’t be possible to do in your brain. (Computers are good at math, right?) Good computer games will often have the sorts of calculations that any person could very easily do, because designers want the game to be understandable. What the computer does is removes all the drudgery of things like deck shuffling, or allowing for things like reordering cards quickly, or removing the need for you to make space on a small table.

And the themes that solitaire games can be grafted onto feel endless and ever changing. Ancient Enemy is a solitaire style RPG about surviving in a crumbling world and Regency Solitaire is set in Regency Britain, in a Bridgerton style romance. Both are published by Grey Alien Games, both are excellent, and both feel right at home within the broader genre.

The Shuffle Never Ends

The final fun note I’ll end this tour through the world of solitaire is this, you can’t lose your place in a game of solitaire. Because the action of the game is the same as the action of a turn, there aren’t any steps that you can miss if you have to drop the game. This is part of what makes the game have such enduring charm. It’s the type of experience you can get lost in, but also that you can drop and come back to, or only play for a couple of minutes. This sort of flexibility makes it a perfect fit in a world where you might be looking to kill time between meetings or relax after a long day. And with the range of options available, how deep you choose to go is truly up to you.

1. This is a reference to the NFL head coaching concept where coordinators who are later promoted to head coach become a part of someone’s “coaching tree”. Like a family tree but for football royalty.

2. I suspect this is in part because he was trying to get into and understand why I love games so much.