Spider Solitaire

Genre: Card Game (Solitaire – Spider)

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Solitaire Deluxe Bundle – 3 in 1 along with Freecel Solitaire Deluxe and Klondike Solitaire.)

Spider Solitaire, released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a version of the Card Game of the same name. As this game is a classic card game and likely older than anyone currently reading this review, I’ll be focusing mainly on the presentation, features, options, and performance of this game.

The presentation here is good, giving players a variety of unlockable skins for card fronts, backs, and tables, all with a fair amount of detail. The tables I saw in this game are fairly abstract in nature, rather than feeling like a real-world place, but look decent enough. The game also has a variety of music that’s apparently public domain, but it’s still decent and there’s a good variety… although that is, again, after you unlock it.

Unfortunately, this makes for a bit of frustration, as unlocks are not selected by the player, but simply happen automatically at regular intervals when the player has reached certain point thresholds. Want new music? Too bad, card skin. Want a new table? You need to wait until the game unlocks it for you. At the very least, the game does still award you points even if you lose a game, something that’s important for a Solitaire game that is at times unwinnable.

In addition to the various skins, players also get the ability to choose whether they want to play with one, two, or four suits, but there aren’t any additional variants. Oddly, the version of Spider Solitaire contained here will not let players draw if they have an empty stack, a limitation I haven’t seen in other versions of the game. Also, for those who have never played Spider Solitaire before, there’s no tutorial, but there is a decent (but not great) “How to Play”.

The controls here are pretty good, although the game makes the odd choice to make players manually select whether they want to use gamepad or touch controls, rather than both being enabled at the same time. Both controls work fine, though moving the cursor around with the gamepad can feel a bit stiff.

The only other thing to address here is the price. At $9, this is a bit steep for a game that only includes one type of solitaire. Thankfully, this game goes on sale for $2 often, which is a much more reasonable price… but if you’re waiting for a sale, you’re better off going for World of Solitaire from this same publisher, which includes a comparable version of Klondike Solitaire, along with four other Solitaire Card Games, and it also goes on sale for $2.

As far as a game that is only Spider Solitaire, this version of Spider Solitaire is passable, but just about every area of this game could do with improvement. There’s nothing outright bad here, but nothing truly great. Still, if you can get this game on sale, it’ll scratch the Spider Solitaire itch… if you have that particular itch.

tl;dr – Spider Solitaire is a passable version of the classic Card Game, but pretty much every part of this game has places where it could stand to do with some improvement. It’s far from perfect, but it’s decent enough

Grade: C

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