The Facebook apps hub essentially vends a mini game mono-culture. Hedgeless and featureless and planted, as far as the eye can see, with turnips mined by weary Farmville-rs.
Pyramid Solitaire Saga has enjoyed a fair bit of success in this arid environment. A mixture of fun aesthetics, strong marketing, and solid game mechanics ensured the game's popularity on Facebook.
And now this Egyptian ode to the card classic is breaking into the mobile scene.
Available on Android and iOS, Pyramid Solitaire Saga is a puzzler that bills itself as an adventurous romp through Egypt. Together with Helena the archaeologist and her trusty gerbil Kingsley, your task is to raid ancient tombs and bring back the treasures of the Pharaohs of old.
Camel dressed as calf?But that's the fictional froth on a solid solitaire espresso. Helena and Kingsley are just the glitzy glamour that teases you into some decent puzzler mechanics.
Each level presents a selection of cards (known as "tiles") that are arranged in varying pyramid formations. You complete the level by capturing a handful of gold cards which are buried at the bottom of stacks of ordinary ones.
To clear these cards off the table and get to the gold ones underneath you need to use the cards in your hand. If a card on the table is one higher or lower than yours, you can clear the pair of them and move a step closer to those all-important golds.
But wait there's a twist!Of course, it's always more complicated than that. In an interesting twist you actually gain points for having ordinary cards left on the table once you've grabbed all the golds.
Joker tiles also make an appearance, shaking things up by allowing you to clear whichever card you like.
Another nifty addition is the scarab. Once you clear a gold card, one of these beetles scuttles across the screen.
Tap it before it escapes and you'll earn some points. You'll need to be smart to earn enough to get a three-star rating, and squishing the bugs helps a great deal.
And yet, for all its glamour, it's hard to get around the fact that this is a Facebook game.
"ARE YOUR FRIENDS ON THE MAP?" Helena screeches at the end of each level, her gerbil swinging wildly from her shoulder.
There's a Facebook logo on the score page imploring you to "connect" and "share your progress" online.
More intrusively, some new sections of the game require you to ask friends for help before they open. If you won't or can't annoy your friends, you've got to wait a few days for the stage to unlock, passing the time by lamenting your lonely existence.
Still, for puzzler fanatics who aren't averse to telling their Newsfeed they've made it to level 15 of "Dusty Ancient Kingdom #12" there's a lot here to like. Pyramid Solitaire Saga adds enough nifty twists to the solitaire model that it feels reasonably fresh.
For everyone else the ever-present in-app-purchases and over-the-head-clobbering to connect with Facebook will probably be a little too much. Maybe that's why they included the distractingly cute, doe-eyed stare of Kingsley the gerbil in the first place.
Pyramid Solitaire Saga
Pyramid Solitaire Saga may be the posterboy for free-to-play, but it manages to make up for it with nice graphics and compelling design
Alysia Judge
After spending months persuading her parents that it's a valuable career path, Alysia is still not bored with writing about games. That's a good thing really, since skills like spaceship navigation and zombie slaying are pretty much non-transferable.