Top Hits: Solitaire 8 in 1

Rainy days as a child for me used to consist of gathering up the battered family deck of cards (the one where the ace of clubs just happened to have a tiny rip), laying them all out on the kitchen table, and getting slowly more and more frustrated by either golf or pyramid.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, if I were a child now I’d probably pop in my earphones, whip out my mobile phone, and play something that isn’t Top Hits: Solitaire 8 in 1.

It’s not that the games included in the pack are particularly bad (with one notable exception) - it's just that the execution and range isn’t particularly inspiring compared to others in the crowded mobile solitaire market.

The eight solitaire variants on offer range from the now-ubiquitous Klondike to the excellent Canfield and incredibly annoying Spider.

Naturally, whether you like these games is down to personal preference, but it's safe to say that all rely on healthy dollops of luck.

From a purely objective viewpoint, the weakest title is the Shanghai Mahjongg-lite Two of a Kind, which shares a similar ruleset to the classic tile game (match two of the same cards to remove them from the board), but falls down somewhat when it becomes apparent that there are only two layers in play, making it almost impossible to lose.

On the flip-side to this is Pyramide, which I’m hoping is the French variant on Pyramid that I’ve never seen before, because it takes what is one of my favourite solitaire games and saps the fun out of the rules.

Of more concern to the average player is the presentation of the games. The lack of customisable decks and backgrounds is a real disappointment considering these features have become as common in card games as being able to save a game’s progress. But this isn’t the biggest annoyance.

That title belongs to the size of the cards, which are, frankly, tiny. When numerous cards are piled on top of each other, as with pretty much all the games, it can be incredibly tricky to pick out a suit from the resulting tiny pixels.

While eight games in one pack sounds like a good deal, the execution of the package means that you’ll most likely end up leaving them all in the deck.