The variants of the solitaire game

3D Solitaire

As its name indicates, the main innovation of this game is to abandon the 2D plane to introduce 3D graphics and little by little it has become a trend for the different solitaire games. The gameplay is the same as the old solitaire but, nevertheless, its greater visual appeal makes the game experience more enjoyable.

Simpsons Solitaire

Homer Simpson and company have moved beyond the television screen and, over the years, into other fields. Just as there is the Simpsons Monopoly, the thematic solitaire of this dysfunctional family is available to everyone and has become a paradigmatic example of thematic Solitaire.

With the same rules as always, Simpsons solitaire incorporates the novelty that the traditional cards are replaced by themed figures from the series. Can you imagine what it would be like to play with the King of Simpsons?

Solitaire with Spanish Deck

The great advantage is that no great preparations are needed; you just need to have a full deck of Spanish cards. The aim of this game is to start with the cards out of order and finish with the deck perfectly sorted. To do this, the whole deck is placed face down in your hand.

Two cards are drawn in turn and placed on the table face up, forming a new pile. Of these two cards, only the topmost card can be played, creating four piles in order from King to Ace.

Chinese Solitaire (Mahjong) and Japanese Solitaire

Although we include it in this article on solitaire, the truth is that it is convenient to play it between four participants. The aim of the game is to get as many points as possible, which are paid for “doing mahjong”, and to do so, you need to have at least eight points.

The game is played with 144 tiles which are divided into normal tiles ranging from 1 to 9 and divided into three suits (bamboos, balls and characters) with four identical tiles of each type. There are also special tiles (honours, flowers and seasons) which are subdivided. For more information, we invite you to read the article we recently published about Mahjong.

About Japanese solitaire, it is a variant of the card game in which instead of arranging the cards by suits, we have to arrange 13 piles that have been previously distributed on the table; where we have to move the cards to the most suitable pile where the groups of cards can be arranged according to the colours of the deck. The King must always be the last card in each pile.

Conclusions about Solitaire

As you will have noticed throughout this text, as a result of the success of the classic solitaire game, dozens of variants of the game have been created. The list we have made is not exhaustive, since there are other variants such as solitaire poker, accordion solitaire, Yukon solitaire, Golf solitaire, Canfield solitaire, etcetera.

Undoubtedly, its success is due to its ease of playability, simple rules, simple graphic environment for those who do not have large video cards and amazing for those who have a powerful computer and above all, the possibility of playing it alone (hence its name).

In a modern world, where everything is busy and your friends often don’t have the time to get involved with you in a game, solitaire has proven to be a very efficient board game when it comes to kill boredom.

However, I recommend you not to use it during office hours. Whenever you are tempted to do so, remember the story of poor Edward Greenwood.

As I always say, play responsibly. Remember that solitaire is just that, a game designed to clear your mind and don’t let it become something that generates too much attention from you.

Advantages and disadvantages of playing Solitaire

One of the advantages of playing online is that you can play anywhere from any device and there are even versions where you can play offline, and at the same time one of the disadvantages of playing offline is that you obviously need a pack of cards to play, and this is not always possible because you don’t normally carry a deck of cards with you at all times.

We also find that online the dealing of cards is random and the chance of a good shuffle is higher, and offline it is much easier to not shuffle the deck ourselves, as we shuffle the cards ourselves.