Friendly card - zsc

There is an awful lot of solitaire on Steam.

My interests in playing Solitaire on every platform that I possibly can, have seen me keeping informed about releases of solitaire games across the major active storefronts in the gaming world. Steam, undisputedly the largest digital retailer of PC games, did not always have so much solitaire on it. Certainly, where we are now, there's a lot of it to buy, some of it even free to start, with the promise of extras (or perks) for those who will spare the cash. But there's a problem: the vast majority of solitaire games on Steam all follow the same template.

In 2007, Big Fish Games released a game called Fairway Solitaire. This was, to maybe oversimplify it a bit, an enhanced, prettied-up implementation of a solitaire called Golf. Fairway is by no means the first computer game to implement Golf, but it is _potentially_ the first game to implement Golf with its emphasis on combo-scoring, heavily designed layouts, power-ups, gimmicks, and other PopCap-esque flourishes with which to sink in those hooks. And it's by this template that so many other games have since followed in its footsteps; the likes of Regency Solitaire, Faerie Solitaire, Jewel Quest Solitaire, Solitairica, even personal favorite Shadowhand, are implementations of Golf, with the same emphasis on combo-scoring and power-ups (just to different extents). It left me to wonder, at one point, why there were so few non-Golf solitaires anymore.

I had reviewed Shenzhen Solitaire for The Friendly Card a few years ago. At the time of its release, Shenzhen was something of an oddity, and not just for it being a non-Golf solitaire. Shenzhen had been designed initially as a minigame, to be embedded into another, larger game, specifically Zachtronics' electrical engineering simulator, Shenzhen I/O, that was then released as a standalone product for a discount. It would later turn out that the staff at Zachtronics really enjoy inventing new solitaires, and would go on to invent several new sets of rules - most using unusual decks of cards - for their future releases. I, not being terribly interested in buying entire games just for their minigames, often wondered if these would be given the same treatment. (I had felt a bit burned by Mobius Front '83 being far too difficult for me to play, and thus locking me out of the minigame that got me interested in it in the first place.)

Near the end of 2022, though, is when I'd get my wish: the Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Every solitaire minigame they had invented to that point, collected into a compilation, with one new game invented just for this collection. And not a single one of these games is Golf or Golf-based.

Sawayama Solitaire, hailing from Zachtronics' "final game" Last Call BBS, is presented as the pack-in software for the fictional Sawayama Z5 Powerlance home computer. Rather a lot like _a certain other pack-in solitaire game_, Sawayama's rules are fairly simple, being designed for a standard 52-card deck. It is a Klondike variation where the entire tableau is dealt face-up, empty spaces can be filled with any card or sequence, and the stock deals in threes. The twist: when the stock pile is empty, its space can be used as a free cell. The in-game description says that this was a change intended to make games more winnable without blind luck, though it is certainly possible to win a game without ever using it. Sawayama is presented with charming lower-resolution graphics (fitting to Last Call BBS's old-computer motif) and a groovy little FM-powered jam going in the background.

Proletariat's Patience, this one coming from the cyberpunk-culture game Exapunks, is another build-down game, though this one does away with foundation piles and simply uses the tableau for that instead. Its deck is a Russian-style deck; each of the suits has four face cards instead of three, but the rest of the rank and file only ranges from 10 to 6. Ranked cards build down by suit, while face cards can be built in any order. The goal, then, is to complete each suit's ranked sequence and move it to an empty tableau pile, while also congregating every face card in a suit together and drop that on an empty space as well (locking that pile to further use). It comes with a single free cell, as with Sawayama.

Shenzhen Solitaire, which - again - I reviewed before as a standalone product, is here largely unchanged from its original release, though ZSC does grant it the benefit of improved graphics resolution for those with 4K displays. I, unfortunately, am not in possession of such a display, so my thoughts on the game here are identical to what they were before. In either case, I do still love it.

Sigmar's Garden stands out from this collection for not involving playing cards at all; it was designed for the alchemy machine building game, Opus Magnum, and reuses the grid and alchemical marbles from the main game's puzzles. Shanghai/Mahjong Solitaire rules are in play here: pick out matching pairs of marbles that are free to slide out. However, there are more ways to match marbles than simply by which ones are the same color; an on-screen diagram comes in very handy for remembering which ones can match with which other ones, as the pairs are not always identical, and it is difficult to explain through text alone. However, it is the sort of game which can be won fairly consistently, if given careful thought and appropriate planning.

Another game that benefits greatly from appropriate planning is Cribbage Solitaire. This one comes from the alternate-timeline military wargame, Mobius Front '83, and is equipped with a military-issued deck of period-appropriate aircraft spotter cards. Cribbage is not a game ordinarily played by oneself; this implementation of it sees you taking cards from any of four columns, to build the strongest Cribbage hand you can within either 7 cards, or 31 points, whichever one you hit first, and aim for a certain minimum number of points by the time the table is cleared. This game is the only one in the collection to feature the staple Zachtronics histogram, showing you the average scores attained on this specific deal out of all players to whom it has been dealt.

CLUJ - what a way to spell "kludge" - hails from Opus Magnum's spiritual sequel, Molek-Syntez, which normally has you arranging chemical proteins by moving molecules around on a board. Like Proletariat's Patience, CLUJ uses a Russian-style deck of cards, with numbered ranks from 6 to 10, and face cards bearing ranks of T, K, D, and V. The goal, this time, is to arrange complete sequences from 6 to T, and deposit them on an empty pile to lock it off. This would normally be near impossible with the meager 6 tableau piles the game offers, except that CLUJ allows you to "cheat" by moving single cards to locations where they are normally not able to go. You are not able to wantonly drop every card wherever you want, though, as "cheated" cards are inverted and cannot be played upon until they've made a legal move elsewhere. Winning without cheating is, by the game's own admission, a matter of dumb luck, but it does still keep track of whether or not you have cheated in a given deal by showing a tiny little "angel" icon on the screen for as long as your game remains free of sin.

Kabufuda is an outlier among this collection, as it is the only game that has appeared in _two_ other Zachtronics games (Eliza and Last Call BBS), but it has a very unique set of rules, using the Japanese Kabufuda deck as its basis. Rather than force players to learn the ranks of kabufuda cards (as there is definitely a learning curve to reading them), the player must stack identically ranked cards together into stacks of four, and then move that stack to an empty pile or free cell. Since a given card cannot stack on anything but itself, this game forces a lot of planning, especially if you are playing on the harder difficulty levels; harder modes start off with a number of the free cells locked, only unlocking when you have moved a complete set to an empty tableau pile. A free cell can be used to deposit a set, but only if it’s complete; on the other hand, a tableau pile can carry an incomplete set, but locking one of these piles with a complete one is the only way to get your free cells back.

The final game on offer here is an all-new one exclusive to ZSC, called Fortune's Foundation, played with a deck of tarot cards (albeit, with one rank of face cards removed). I've reviewed a tarot-based solitaire game before in Cnidarian, but Fortune's takes a very different tack with its rule set. Its cards cannot be moved as sets, but can be stacked in reverse order, with the same also being true of the Major Arcana. Most unusual about this game is how its free cell works - you get a single free cell, but storing any card up there blocks the foundation piles from being used (except for the Major Arcana). This, coupled with only being able to move a single card at a time, makes this one possibly the hardest game in the collection, and one that requires a lot of forethought and "defensive" play, leaving piles empty wherever possible so that a stack can be reversed or the free cell cleared. That said, it is also the only ZSC solitaire that has an undo button, granting players a single level of undo in case they've taken things one step too far.