I recently had a long set of flights coming home from the west coast with some significant layovers and several stops along the way. Unfortunately for me, I’m not a very active reader, so using up time by reading books isn’t for me. I tried downloading some movies and alas the mess involved to download movies and the space they take up on your hard drive, also causes problems.
With that in mind I decided to play some solitaire card games and other video games on my laptop to make the time go by faster, and have a little fun. I’m old enough to have owned and played the original Pong game, so gaming for me goes way back and while there are lots of interesting games out there, being limited by a laptop touch pad makes most of them either useless or just not very fun to play.
I set out to find some good games for a laptop and after a bit of searching, one of the sites I landed on was https://www.solitaire.org/. I was pleasantly surprised at just how many games were available on just this one page and I never knew there were so many variants of simple solitaire. Solitaire.org offer not only the basic Solitaire card game but also 50+ solitaire variations.
I started out playing basic solitaire and I’d recommend if you have the time that you read the great scoring tips and strategies underneath the game itself on the website. I’ve been playing solitaire all my life and I honestly learned a new strategy just today. The basic solitaire game remains fun and in just doing “game research” I managed to play for over an hour.
I explored the other categories of games on solitaire.org and after looking through Klondike, FreeCell, Spider, Pyramid, Tripeaks and Mahjong, I landed on Golf. Thankfully the game has easy and hard modes and since I was learning the game, I chose easy.
Golf Solitaire’s goal is to clear the cards from the seven stacks of cards at the top and you can only clear them when the card on top of the draw pile is within one digit of the card you want to clear. It took me a few games to get the hang of it, but after that it became pretty addictive. There’s a subtle strategy with how you clear cards to maximize your options and after only a few games, I actually won a game. Of course I played for another 30-minutes just to try to win again and another 15-minutes before I started racing the clock. This is a fun game.
It took me a while to get the hang of Spider Solitaire, but once I did, I was hooked. The trick with Spider is that when you draw cards, it covers many of the sequences you’ve already built making for more options, but more problems too. This game was difficult to win even on the easy setting, but it was a lot of fun.
If you like normal solitaire but you want a new twist, then try out Free Cell. The goal of this game is the same stacking of cards in sequence by suit, but Free Cell gives you four spots to hold cards temporarily. This makes the options for keeping the game moving much more flexible and of course the game strategy increases as well. It took me a while to actually win, but once I did win, I started to see more and more options to win. This game gets easier but remains challenging.
As my last flight prepared to take off, I tried out Pyramid Solitaire. This game starts with a stack of cards in a pyramid shape and the goal is to click on two cards that add up to 13. There is a draw pile you can use, and Kings get cleared with just a click (since they already total 13). This game was perhaps my favorite because it was fun, challenging but also a bit mindless entertainment. The luck of the draw determines a lot and you do win enough to make it challenging but still fun…and if you like Pyramid, be sure to try out the Giza Pyramid variation…it’s a blast!
In the end my last flight landed and my long travel day went very quickly thanks to solitaire.org. This was a real bonus on a long day of waiting for flights when I was expecting to be bored out of my mind. After all was said and done, I not only found a great way to pass the time, but I also had a lot of fun; in fact I now still find myself wandering out to solitaire.org when I’m looking for a little gaming fun even when I’m not flying.
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