Royal Solitaire
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| Royal Solitaire

Let's be honest here: is anyone seriously interested in any form of solitaire other than the popular one? Y'know, cards in piles, turning over three at a time from the deck, and arranging them into suits while swearing (then cheating) if you get stuck.

Yet there are plenty of other ways to play solitaire, and EA Mobile has crammed ten of 'em into this iPod game. Step forward Aces Up, Beleaguered Castle, Canfield, FreeCell, Golf, Klondike, Peaks, Pyramid, Scorpion, and Yukon. I promise I haven't made any of them up.

In that sense, Royal Solitaire can be considered as an education: a primer in the wonderful world of solitaire variants that your Nan didn't teach you to play. Trouble is, does anyone want that enough to pay £3.99 for it, especially given there's a version of basic solitaire preloaded on every iPod?

Another problem is that for each variant here, you're told the rules before playing on a screen that only shows three short lines of explanation at a time, forcing you to scroll forwards and backwards, which isn't great for taking them in. Once you start playing, you're on your own, short of using the Menu button to access the main help screens to check the rules again.

Much better would've been a built-in tutorial for every solitaire variant, teaching you the rules and structure during your first game. As it is, you either have to grit your teeth and keep flitting back to the instructions, or know the games already.

If all this sounds a bit negative, at least Royal Solitaire is well presented, with cartoony Jacks and Queens in the loading screens, and clear, sharp cards when you're actually playing. The scroll-wheel isn't a hindrance, as you're mainly moving left and right, and the music is a quirky mixture of medieval melodies and hip-hop beats. Once again, you can swap this for your own tunes if preferred.

Royal Solitaire also keeps track of your statistics, recording for each game how long you've played in total, the quickest you've completed a game, how many moves it took, and embarrassingly, how many games you've started AND finished (that is, you'll be suitably shamed if you tend to abandon games when all looks hopeless).

Royal Solitaire isn't a bad game, as such. It achieves what it sets out to do, but that concept isn't really sufficiently appealing. On the one hand, you've already got the free solitaire game that comes preloaded on your iPod, and on the other, there's Apple's impressive Texas Hold'em, with its full tournament play, albeit in a totally different card game.

It's hard to understand why anyone would choose Royal Solitaire, given this competition from both sides. Beleaguered Castle? Maybe.

Royal Solitaire

A basic solitaire comes free with the iPod, so Royal Solitaire, with its choice of ten flavours, is really only for completists
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Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)