Solitaire Card Games

Genre: Compilation / Card Game (Solitaire)

Players: 1

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Review:

Solitaire Card Games, released on Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a Compilation of three different types of Solitaire Card Games – Kings Klondike, Kings Spider, and Kings TriPeaks. As these games are all classic card games and likely older than anyone currently reading this review, I’ll be focusing mainly on the presentation, features, options, and performance of this game. And before I go any further, I’ll mention an important note right here – this game requires the touchscreen to play, and as such cannot be played in docked mode.

The presentation in this game feels like a confused jumble of two different sets of assets mixed together. On the one hand, you have fairly simple, classy visuals, which pair well enough with the annoying and repetitive Renaissance Faire-esque acoustic music that occasionally plays during the game. But in addition to that, you have goofy, cartoony art assets that seem more at home with the tiresome ragtime-style music that occasionally plays during the game. However, this game’s inability to pick a lane is just one of its issues.

Regardless of which game you choose, the touchscreen controls will be finicky. The cards are small enough onscreen that it’s difficult to pick the one you want in a stack, but even more than that, moving a card to a new placement often won’t get it to stick unless you make absolutely sure to drop it right on top of said stack, which can get annoying. In addition, while the game does have a “double tap to automatically send to the obvious location this card goes” feature, it is unreliable, and you’ll likely have to tap multiple times before it registers.

And that’s all if the game is working properly. Unfortunately, I ran into an issue when trying to place a card where not only did it not register the new placement, it didn’t not register it, instead flying off to the middle of the screen and causing a glitch where trying to move a card can move multiple cards at once. It’s easy enough to fix by redoing the placement you were originally going to make, but it’s still an amateurish issue that really should have been fixed before this game was released.

The three games here do not come with any sort of instructions or tutorials, so you’d better know how to play before starting, or look up a tutorial online. Each of the games only offers one option – whether to play it with just one suit, with two suits, or all four suits, with each corresponding to a different difficulty. This is a decent feature, but it’s still disappointing that each of these games lacks variants – Klondike can only be played in the draw one variant, not the draw three variant. Spider Solitaire only plays in the default variant with no alternates… and then there’s TriPeaks.

This game’s version of TriPeaks… isn’t TriPeaks. I’m not the world’s biggest expert on different types of Solitaire, but I know TriPeaks, and this ain’t it. It’s not that difficult to tell – the cards literally are not dealt in the three-triangle pattern that is the game’s signature. I wish I could tell you what type of Solitaire this game is, but just know that this game isn’t what it says.

$6 for three classic solitaire games would probably be a decent price, but Solitaire Card Games manages to mess up virtually every part of this simple premise. This game can’t be played in docked mode, the presentation is inconsistent, the controls are a mess, the game is buggy, there’s a distinct lack of options, and one of the included games here isn’t even what it says it is! Given the vast number of solitaire games available on the Nintendo Switch, there is no reason to get this broken collection.

tl;dr – Solitaire Card Games is a Compilation of three Card Games, Klondike, Spider, and TriPeaks… except the game can’t be played in docked mode, the controls are terrible, the presentation is inconsistent, there’s a lack of options, and the game they call TriPeaks isn’t even TriPeaks! There are plenty of other solitaire games on the Nintendo Switch, skip this one.

Grade: D

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