Zachtronics Solitaire

Review by eFreeware

If you have played a Zachtronics puzzle game and remember the small card game tucked inside it, this collection is built for you. Zachtronics Solitaire gathers seven of those minigames, originally made between 2016 and 2022, into one paid app and adds an eighth variant that exists nowhere else. The pitch is straightforward: the same unusual rule sets, redrawn at higher resolution and given a proper home on Android.

Anyone who treats solitaire as a way to fill a few quiet minutes will find plenty here, but the appeal is narrower than a generic card app. These are variants with their own logic and their own decks, not eight skins of the same game. At $4.99 with no ads and no in-app purchases, the whole thing arrives in one piece, which is the model I would expect from a studio selling a finished product rather than a service.

It has been on Google Play since October 2022 and sits at a 4.5 average from 245 ratings, with more than 5,000 installs. Those numbers describe a small, settled audience rather than a mass-market hit, which fits a collection this specific.

Eight rule sets instead of one deck of cards

The collection's selling point is range. Shenzhen Solitaire takes the FreeCell idea and swaps in a three-color deck modeled on mahjong tiles. Proletariat's Patience mixes two rules: some cards group by suit, others stack by alternating colors. Each one asks you to hold a different set of rules in your head.

Kabufuda Solitaire uses Japanese kabufuda cards and gates progress behind set-making, since you earn additional free cells by completing sets. Cluj Solitaire lets you place cards wherever you like, with the catch that carelessness costs you. Cribbage Solitaire turns the whole thing into a scoring exercise using modified Cribbage rules and a Cold War aircraft recognition deck, which is as odd as it sounds and clearly deliberate.

Sawayama Solitaire is a reworked Klondike that the developer says plays quicker and rewards planning, with wins coming more often. That framing matters, because it tells you the studio was willing to change the rules rather than reproduce them. If you have bounced off Klondike because of how often it stalls, this is the variant I would try first.

The new Tarot deck and what it adds

Fortune's Foundation is the newest game here. It uses a Tarot deck and is pitched as extra-challenging, with a fortune presented to you when you win. That last detail gives the variant a small reward loop beyond the usual satisfaction of clearing the board.

I would expect this to be the hardest of the eight. A Tarot deck is larger and stranger than a standard one, and the developer calls the variant challenging rather than merely different. Players who like solitaire as a puzzle to be solved rather than a habit to be maintained will probably spend most of their time here.

Presentation, price and the shape of the package

The seven returning games have been updated with new high-resolution graphics, so the artwork has been reworked for modern screens rather than stretched from its original form. That is the kind of housekeeping a collection needs, and it suggests the studio treated this as a release rather than a re-upload.

The price is $4.99, paid once. There are no ads and no in-app purchases, so nothing interrupts a game and nothing sits behind a second payment. For a set of eight rule sets, several of which are unlike anything in a typical card app, that is an easy number to justify if the variants sound interesting to you.

The most recent update, in August 2023, was a move to a newer Android SDK as required by Google Play. That is maintenance rather than new content, and it tells you where the app currently stands: finished, kept running, not expanding.

Suited to a particular sort of card player

This collection is for people who already like solitaire enough to want more than one version of it, and who enjoy learning a rule set as much as playing it. The variety is the point. If you like the idea of moving between a mahjong-inspired deck, an alchemical tile matcher and a scoring game with aircraft silhouettes on the cards, the app is doing something no single-rule solitaire game can.

It also suits players coming from Zachtronics' puzzle games who want to revisit those minigames without reinstalling the originals, and anyone who prefers paying once to watching ads between rounds. The content rating is Everyone, and nothing in the rules suggests otherwise.

The narrower fit is anyone who wants one familiar game done well and left alone. Eight variants means eight sets of rules to absorb, and a player who wants to sit down with standard Klondike and no decisions about which game to open will find the collection busier than they need.

A paid collection worth its asking price

The 4.5 average from 245 ratings on a modest install base reads like a small group of players who got exactly what they came for.

I would point anyone curious about unusual card rules toward it, especially players who have worn out their patience for standard Klondike and want something with more invention. If you want a single familiar solitaire game and nothing else, the collection's whole reason for existing is the thing you would be paying to skip past.

What's new in version 1.4

Updating to a new version of the Android SDK as required by the Google Play store.