Zachtronics Solitaire Collection

I’ve talked about several minesweeper games, but time for a twist, Solitaire. 8 of them, in fact. All with their own theme and twists. You might have played some of these variants if you’ve ever played a Zachtronics game, but if there are any you’ve missed, you’ll want to pick this game up.

So there are 8 variants, and you might have played 7 of them already, depending on which Zachtronics games you’ve played. Personally I was aquainted with 4 of them, so getting to play the other three was super nice. The Solitaire Collection also has 1 variant that is new and unique to this game: Fortune’s Foundation, which is a relatively interesting variant played with a deck of Tarot cards. Don’t expect to win your first dozen games though, it’s super hard and takes a good while to start seeing through the logic required to prevent backing yourself into a corner.

The games in the collection are, in approximate order of difficulty:

• Sawayama Solitaire: A variant on 3-draw Klondike, where instead of being able to flitter through the draw pile, once it’s exhausted you get a free cell to use instead.
• Sigmar’s Garden: A variant on Mahjong Solitaire, where you have to pair off marbles either by element, or in order of metal transmutations with quicksilver. Every board configuration is solvable, though it is still possible to trap yourself and fail.
• Proliteriat’s Patience: A version of solitaire where the face cards have to be grouped together, and the numbers have to be grouped by alternating colours.
• Shenzhen Solitaire: A variant of FreeCell where you have 3 colours, and have to reveal all 4 dragons of a colour in order to clear them all at once.
• Cribbage Solitaire: A score-based solitaire using cribbage inspired rules. This variant interestingly also has a histogram to compare your score to others.
• Kabufuda Solitaire: A set-matching solitaire using kabufuda cards, the objective being to match sets of 4 cards into an empty column to clear them.
• Cluj Solitaire: An original variant using Russian cards (TKDV then 10-6) where the objective is to organise the cards in decending order. Uniquely, you can “cheat” by placing a single card in an invalid place, but then that card is stuck there until it can be moved back to a valid place. This variant is extremely luck dependant, so may not always be winnable.
• Fortune’s Foundation: A version of Solitaire using Tarot cards, where you have to get the minor arcana to the foundation from Ace upwards, and the major arcana starting from 0 and 21 and going in both directions. Uniquely, you can only move 1 card at a time here, but you can stack both ascending and decending. Thats what makes this variant so tricky to tackle.

I do have a couple gripes, like with some of the UI decisions they made for Fortune’s, but other than that, I’d recommend this for anyone who enjoys single player card/puzzle games.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1988540 £7.19
Itch.io: https://zachtronics.itch.io/the-zachtronics-solitaire-collection $9.99 (Comes with a Steam key)