Age of Solitaire

Review

The dark wizard weaved his magic in far off lands but the prosperity of the kingdom of men brought forth great anger and envy within him. So, he prepared a powerful spell in which to destroy the kingdom of men; this took many years to prepare. With one stroke the kingdom of men was in ruins, and very few managed to escape. You play as the princess Arianna, whose father tried his best to defend his people against the dark wizard, but ultimately fell. Before he left this mortal realm, he passed on all his power to Arianna, along with his final wish, to rebuild the kingdom in the new lands. Arianna promises to rebuild the kingdom of men and fulfil her father’s last wish.

The game starts where you’re going to rebuild your kingdom, a plot of land with a mountain range to the west and a river running around the eastern and southern borders. You are greeted by a fortune teller who has been asked by your father to help you rebuild the kingdom using magic cards. She will get you started by telling you to build a Pavilion, and by building a pavilion it will give you a deck of playing cards which you’ll use to play the game. To build you need gold, but luckily enough you have fifty gold, just enough to build the pavilion and get you started. Once it’s built it will show on your plot of land.

At this point you’ll be able to start playing solitaire by hitting the Play button. The cards aren’t laid out as in a normal game of solitaire but arranged in many different ways, some games will have more cards to play with than others. The object is the same, to get rid of all the cards on the field, to do this you must remove a card from the field and place it on the foundation card. It doesn’t have to follow suit, but it must be either one card higher or lower than the foundation card. So, if the foundation card is nine, then you can place either a ten or eight card onto the foundation card. You continue to add cards from the field to the foundation until there’s no more cards which you can use this turn; when this happens, you’ll need to turn over a new foundation card until you can use another card on the field. If you can play five cards consecutively, you’ll unlock the combo; the more cards you can consecutively play will increase your combo bonus multiplier. This bonus will multiply any gold you collect at the end of the round, which is needed to rebuild your kingdom.

Each game after a new building has been built will have goals which you’ll need to complete before being able to move on to the next one. You can check the current goal while in-game by clicking the Goals button in the top left of the screen. These goals can be either collecting enough gold to build the next building, find six parts of a relic, or find ten rubies to charge up your Royal Amulet and protect your kingdom from attack. As you remove cards from play, they may reveal gold, relic parts and rubies. When searching for relic parts and rubies there are two hidden in each game; it will take at least three games to collect all relic parts, and five games for collecting all of the rubies. Once you’ve collected all relic parts it will be put back together, and you can view your new relic on display by clicking the Relic button on the main game page. Collecting all ten rubies will allow you to defeat monsters, pirates, dragons and the dark wizard as they attack your new kingdom.

To make it a little bit tougher, in some games you’ll need to find a key as some cards are bound in chains and you need the key to unlock them and get them in play. You’ll also come across some which are locked, and to open them you must produce a combo of a certain number of consecutive cards played. The amount needed to unlock them is shown as a number inside a keyhole on one of the cards.

There is some help for you as well.  On some of the buildings you build you’ll get a bonus; for example, building the Mage Tower will give you the Wheel of Time, which will give you one extra undo per round should you need it, and if you are still stuck there is a hint button to aid you. Should you make a mistake you can undo a move and if you happen to miss a card you could have played, the game will let you know about it (although if you’ve already used your undo then it’s not going to do anything, so use it wisely if you have to). As you remove cards on the field there maybe a chance to get a Wild Card.  If you get one of these, they will sit in a section next to the foundation card and can be used to replace the foundation card.

There are twelve buildings in total, which you’ll have to build before your kingdom is completed. Underneath where it displays the amount of gold you currently have, is a bar which will fill up as you build your kingdom, and indicates how far you’ve got to go until finished.

The options consist of Music and Sound volume sliders, Screen Brightness slider, Full screen, Widescreen and Custom Cursor On/Off options. There is also the option of four different playing card styles to choose from.

A nice and relaxing solitaire game, the story/campaign isn’t very long. I thought it could have done with being a little bit harder; I didn’t need to use the bonuses from buildings much, but I still really enjoyed the game and you can still play it after completing the game, or even start a new profile and go through the game again.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!