Of Solitaire

Games have been on my mind after a weekend binge-watching a K-Drama series where characters play high stakes Korean childhood games. Are you a gamer? Do you play the occasional game on your mobile phone you or are a bit more serious with your play; computer games and video game consoles?

I grew up an avid gamer had an 8 bit TV game console with 2D graphics but it was life. These days of 4K game consoles with Ray Tracing and the kid in me just comes out to play. While I like the graphics and the world building I still appreciate the simple card games like crazy 8 and Solitaire.

I recall the family sitting together in the lounge with a deck of cards playing a game of Crazy 8 on game night. My mum taught me how to play Solitaire. She would tell us how she spend what should have been hours being productive playing Solitaire on the work Windows computer. We didn’t have a home computer but we had a deck of cards.

As the name suggests Solitaire is a game one plays by themselves, it takes a certain level of patience. The game emerged in Northern Europe in the 1700s and the earliest recorded literature references to it as a game called Patience and only started being known as Solitaire after it made its way across the Atlantic to wind up in the USA.

While it was a fairly popular game, it cemented its place in the hall of game fame when it became a stock application that came with the Windows Operating System from the 1990 release. 30 years later Windows OS still comes with Solitaire, it skipped Windows 8 but was brought back in Windows 10; quick checking my Windows 11 Developers Build, and yep still there... (but with adverts unless you subscribe to the premium version)

For those who don’t have it or who use alternative Operating Systems fret not you can still enjoy this timeless game on the World Wide Web. Solitaire.org offers this game online for free; mahala no wahala.

The beauty of the site is that it is a progressive web app (PWA) which means it’s a website coded to function as an application and once you have loaded the page you can play offline. It also works on a mobile device very easily for that on-the-go type of play or in bed ^_^

• 

• 

The site has several types of solitaire to choose from, Spider, Klondike, Freecell, Pyramid, Tripeaks, Golf and Mahjong each with unique variations to the classic Solitaire game.

And while the homepage is dedicated to Solitaire, tucked at the bottom of the site are other types of browser-based web games from Card Games such as Crazy 8, Logic and Puzzle games like Sudoko and Crossword Puzzles to Match 3 games such as Zuma you remember Zuma?; the game not the former president of South Africa haha..

I tried my hand at the Crazy Eights but it was not quite as satisfying as the version we played with cards, for starters how do you play without a joker??? I was today years old when I realised it was called Crazy Eights because the 8 cards are Wild Cards and can be played on any Suite; Hearts, Diamonds, Spades or Clubs

The rules are different from the one we grew up playing, we called in crazy 8 and quite possibly we made up our own rules such as lucky card, pick & play and being penalized for playing wrong card and failing to announced that you were about to close similar to how in chess you supposed to say checkmate.

I love love Crossword Puzzles, the was a time when my sole reason for buying newspapers and People Magazine was simply to do the puzzles (and looked out for the special editions with that bumber puzzle issues)

The Crossword Puzzles on Solitaire.org might just be my new favourite bookmark and each day the site uploads a new crossword puzzle.

While they don’t dish out the solutions, you can tell if the answer you entered is correct; if its green then its correct and if its red its incorrect. The puzzles come with an option to print out for that old school pen and paper feel and a nifty little timer so you can see how much time you spend working on a crossword, if you geek like that.

Do you play online games, what’s your plug? What kind of games do you play, online and offline?

~B