For those who like solitaire card games, this is one of the better and more challenging ones. Based on an original Danish game, this one was translated into English and released as freeware on the "Outlet" disk-based magazine.
Briefly, the game consists of a jokerless pack of cards randomly dealt into four rows of thirteen. The aces are then removed, leaving four random gaps. Cards are then moved one at a time by the player, into the gaps with the restriction that a card can only be moved into a gap if it is of the same suit and of a value one higher than the card that is immediately to the left of the gap. The goal is to end up with four rows or perfectly ordered suits from deuces (twos) to kings.
Sounds easy? Well, it certainly isn't. It's very easy to get a "gridlock" of cards that can't be shifted due to locked, circular dependencies. Really, the challenge of the game is looking quite a few moves ahead and with the aid of a good memory, avoiding these situations.
Card games are something that can generally be implemented just as well on 8-bit systems as on more powerful computers. Here, the card graphics whilst neccesarily low-res are more detailed than on many games of the time, with the faces on the "face cards" actually visible for example. The game has a simple introductory tutorial mode, which is very well done and effectively explains the rules of the game even better than any instructions can hope to do.
As expected, the game background is the (almost compulsory) "Poker table green", which never fails to give the right sort of look for card games. This is well worth a play, particularly if you've already played (for example) all of the solitaire card games from Amiga PD disks from around the 1990 era. This speccy game has a strikingly similar look and feel of those games from the more advanced machine. Very good effort.
