Re:Solitaire
by sl3dge78 on Thursday February 27, 2025 @12:22PM
(#43196390)
I highly recommend the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Greatly designed solitaire games. I play them every day on my commute to work.
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I was gonna recommend the same one. I wanna add that Hempuli (Baba is You, Noita) also made a solitaire collection inspired by Zachtronics. It's just 3 bucks on his itchio and it's something I play while I have my coffee.
https://hempuli.itch.io/a-solitaire-mystery
Funny enough it has a "Royal Flush Solitaire" where you make poker hands and your goal is to reach 240 points.
Binary Solitaire and Transformation are my favorites.
The Solitaire Mystery is also the name of a very interesting novel that explores all kinds of permutations of the cards, suits, etc, etc, by Jostein Gaarder, author of Sophie's World.
I absolutely love the Zachtronics solitaires. I play at least one a day on my phone. That said, I wish they were slightly better designed for phones, since the text/images and touch targets can be a little small. It's too bad Zachtronics is no more -- it'd be nice if they were able to do some UI updates.
I heard from an obscure source (a former Zachtronics intern in a stream chat) that they're currently building a new game
Re:Solitaire
by adamrezich on Thursday February 27, 2025 @06:22PM
(#43199718)
Since Zachtronics only ever had one intern, I heard the same thing from the same source (but through different means)!
I have the same gripe about Balatro. Tons of hours on computer, was super stoked for it on phones. Too small for my old eyes.
Thirding this recommendation, Fortune's Favor solitaire and Shenzen solitaire from this collection are some of my favorite variants ever. Either of them would be worth the price of admission alone.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection inspired me to begin experimenting with Solitaire variants, and hopefully Balatro's well-deserved success will stoke people's curiosity in similar titles.
For now, my web prototype lets you choose the numbers of suits, colors, ranks, columns, and multiples of cards drawn from the deck. It's a start. I invite HN to explore the Klondike Extended Universe:
I LOVE that you let the player tweak those variables in the mechanics. Many of us want to be able to relax with a nice comfy game for half an hour, and "comfy" means setting the difficulty just right.
My partner used to relax with Flipflop Solitaire[1], which lets you choose how many suits there are in the deck. These days they play lots of Balatro with the checkered deck[2].