Best of Board Games: Solitaire

Genre: Compilation / Card Game (Solitaire)

Players: 1

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Review:

Best of Board Games is a Compilation of Chess, Solitaire Mahjong, and Solitaire originally released on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita in 2014. The game was also split up into its individual components, with Best of Board Games: Solitaire releasing on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita in 2014, and Nintendo 3DS in 2015. This version of the game includes 5 Solitaire Card Games: Klondike, Spider, Freecell, Golf, and Pyramid.

This game’s presentation uses decent-looking 2D visuals without any options for card faces, card backs, or backgrounds. Sadly, some of the suits of the card faces look a bit odd (hearts look like acorns) and the game oddly opts to show aces as ones. The top screen features a scoreboard adorned with a cartoony depiction of a slowly-rotating windmill for some reason. This is backed by a lot of birdsong and some extremely faint acoustic guitar, though this sound is mostly swallowed up by the birdsong, which seems like a very strange choice. Overall, the presentation is okay, but definitely lacking in areas.

The game uses mostly touchscreen controls, which work well enough. However, there’s little in the way of options here – for Klondike you can pick to draw 1 or draw 3, for Spider you can pick the number of suits, but there’s no hint button, no interactive tutorial, no alternate sound or display settings, no score settings. Only text guides to instruct new players how to play is included here, as well as an option to cheat three times in each game if you’re stuck (seriously, a cheat function but no hint button?).

If this were being sold under $5, this game would be extremely underwhelming next to other Solitaire games on the platform. However, with its $10 price tag, this is a bad joke of a release. You can get much more than this for much less. Don’t buy Best of Board Games: Solitaire, you can do much better elsewhere.

tl;dr – Best of Board Games: Solitaire is a Compilation of 5 Solitaire Card Games: Klondike, Spider, Freecell, Golf, and Pyramid. At $10 this game is overpriced and comes up short in content and features when compared to games that cost half the price this game does. Do not buy this.

Grade: D

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