Player Select

The premise of this game was intriguing to me. I do like a bit of solitaire and I really like word games and puzzles, so putting them together would be right up my street. I've played the game up to about level 40 over quite a few weeks. I hadn't played for a while, then saw they were celebrating a one-year anniversary in September, so popped back in to take a look. A few more levels complete and I remembered why I had put it down in the first place.

It's in the Game

If you know how to play solitaire, you might expect this game to be easy. But there are extra layers to the format that make it more challenging. Instead of Aces, you have Category cards with yellow-gold edges. You can place them on the home row and start piling them on, or if you've already got a group building up, you can put the Category card on there. But once you do, you can't put any more cards on that pile, so it becomes an extra strategy decision when to move cards and where.

The categories are varied. Some of them are straightforward (horses, cities), others are a bit more niche (heels, robots, electric ports). I haven't found any categories where the knowledge is specific to one country, but there are definitely categories that I don't really know. It ends up being a nice way to learn a few words as well as playing a game.

The downside to this game is the advertising. Third-party ads break in mid-game. I was just about to put the VGA port on the pile to finish the category when the Ad Break sign came up and I had to wait. You can pay £9.99 to get rid of the ads. I don't usually mind paying to remove ads, but that seems a little steep, especially as it's a game I had put down for a while.

It's not just the third-party ads, either. When you open the app you're confronted with in-game features as well. I just wanted to play level 39 but had to cancel the Reward Chest, the Lava Quest and the Piggy Bank just to get to the main screen. It's a lot to wade through to play a simple game of solitaire.

Thoughts

I can see this being the kind of game that I occasionally remember and play, before the ads and pop-ups become too irritating, closing the app and forgetting about it again. For that reason, it's a 3 out of 5.

Rating: 3 / 5