365 Solitaire Club
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| 365 Solitaire Club

Digital Solitaire has proved to be one of the greatest timesinks of the past few decades. By having it readily accessible on your Windows Start Bar, it’s all too easy to start a quick game when your boss is out of the office.

Connect 2 Media isn’t content to have the solitary card game take over office hours, though. 365 Solitaire Club offers you up eight variations of the game on your phone, and even sets out a schedule for you to play every day of the year. It all sounds pretty hardcore.

Of course, when you actually get your hands on the game there’s nothing hardcore about it. Quite the opposite in fact. Just like 365 Puzzle Club, which we reviewed a few months ago, 365 Solitaire Club is instantly inviting and easy to grasp.

The main calendar tour sets up a new game for each day of the year. You can go back and play days that you have missed, but you can’t skip forward.

If you want something a little freer, there’s Seasons mode. This is a more traditional level-based mode in which you try to fill in a game board by successfully completing a number of Solitaire games.

The structure and presentation, then, are identical to 365 Puzzle Club. The only thing that differs is the game being played, and 365 Solitaire is slightly less successful in that regard.

While there are far more variants on display here - the likes of Spider, Klondike and Freecell all get a look in alongside some more obscure examples - the games aren’t handled with quite as much assurance.

Many of the games take up a lot of screen space - so much, in fact, that they stretch off the end, requiring a slight scroll. This means that you never have your whole pile visible on the screen at one time (why no landscape mode?), and you’re constantly having to click a number of spaces left or right to remind yourself what’s on the end.

This highlights another issue: there’s far too much superfluous D-pad pressing. Games like Eight Off often require you click through whole sequences of cards when there should be a some degree of automation.

Ultimately, 365 Solitaire Club is another successful casual compendium wrapped up in a fresh and polished structure, and is well worth your consideration. Unlike its predecessor, though, it doesn’t quite nail the game(s) at its core with total assurance.

365 Solitaire Club

A comprehensive selection of Solitaire variants, presented in a fresh and inviting structure. There are are a few niggles with the it plays cards, but as a package it’ll keep you amused for hours
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Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.