Game Reviews

Solitaire: Deck of Cods

Star onStar onStar onStar halfStar off
Get
Solitaire: Deck of Cods

Picture the scene – you’re sat around a meeting table with a number of glum-faced co-workers.

Your task is to come up with an idea for the next big casual gaming hit for iPhone. Things aren’t going well.

Finally, starved of inspiration and wired on caffeine, you resort to forcing two popular-but-disparate concepts together.

"Well, everyone plays solitaire on their desktop," pipes up a voice from the back, "and fishing games seem to do really well on mobile platforms. Why don’t we bring the two together?"

Bereft of any other ideas you dump the proposal on your boss's desk, with a hastily scrawled working title of Deck of Cods, and nip out before the Indian take-away closes.

That's how we imagine things went down at the Namco offices. What we didn't imagine before playing Solitaire: Deck of Cods is that it would be any good - but it is. It's un-put-downably, improbably fun.

In fact, it could be argued that the game doesn't go far enough with its unlikely concept, cutting the prize catches free when it should be enthusiastically reeling them in.

In terms of mechanics, Namco has somehow managed to simultaneously simplify and liven up solitaire. Faced with a deck of cards stacked into familiar tiered piles and a single active card in front of you, your goal is to remove cards in sequence from the former onto the latter.

If the active card is a six, for example, you could remove either a five or a seven from the main pile (provided they’re on top), which would then become the active card. When you’ve run out of moves to make, you draw a new active card from a small stack.

You also encounter special use cards hidden within the deck. These can be played at any time and allow such benefits as laying a fresh active card without ending a turn, juggling the pack or uncovering all hidden cards.

The fishing element comes (besides a general fishy theme) in the shape of a fishing rod that whirs away at the top of the screen. As you string a sequence of cards together, the size of the fish on the end of the hook grows in size; 15 consecutive cards will score you a 15 inch specimen.

As you acquire different varieties of fish - there are 24 in total - your trophy room steadily fills up as a colourful record of your exploits. It's complemented by Facebook Connect support, so you can show off your achievements to friends.

At the beginning of each of the 50 levels you're given a simple task to fulfil, usually catching a certain number of fish (completing separate sequences) or a single fish of a certain size (find one big sequence). Later on, you're given combinations of the two.

This structure is something of a mixed blessing. While it encourages you to change your approach to each level to meet the requirements, it shifts the focus away from the completion ethic at the heart of solitaire. You often end up succeeding in your task when you're nowhere near finishing the pack, rendering the rest of the level an almost pointless exercise (other than mining for special cards).

This would be rectified if you got rewarded for a total clearance – perhaps a rare fish to add to the trophy cabinet - but you get nothing. In fact, as your wild cards carry over, it's actually a bad idea to aim for a total clearance unless you can do so unaided.

In this way then, Deck of Cods is an improbably good game that somehow fails to fully ram home its quirky charms.

If there’s ever a sequel, one hopes it will be left in the pond to grow to full maturity before it's reeled in. As it is though, the first catch is already mighty fine.

Solitaire: Deck of Cods

Deck of Cods' unusual concept is fully justified by its addictive solitaire-based gameplay, but skilled players may feel frustrated their best efforts go unrewarded
Score
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.