Spider Solitaire Review

If you own a computer, you've probably played Solitaire. After a few hundred hands, though, you might have gotten bored enough to try out some of the other card games that have traditionally been included with computers. While FreeCell can seem a little overwhelming, there's usually been another option - Spider Solitaire. A variant on the much-loved single-player game, Spider Solitaire adds a few more wrinkles to the Solitaire formula. Though it's not exactly the most exciting game of all time, the slightly different ruleset means that it has its own particular following. If you're looking to find a good Spider Solitaire game that will bring you back to the old days of free, off-line games being included with your OS, it makes sense to take a look at Classic Spider Solitaire.

What Works

The good news is that Classic Spider Solitaire really is just that - it's a classic version of Spider Solitaire. One has to imagine that there are some people out there who would want to liven up this game by putting in some bells and whistles, but this iteration is about as basic as you are going to get. You follow the basic rules of Spider Solitaire, and clever players can work their way up to a win if they have time and luck on their side. It's nice to see that this game does present players with three different difficulty options, if only so that most players can drop down to the easy mode to get a win when they finally get frustrated with the harder modes.

What Doesn't Work

The good news is that the game works as intended. The bad news, though, is that the game doesn't look very good. The cards are small even on a relatively wide monitor and they don't look good even if you have great resolution. This makes it hard to read the cards and can cause some serious problems on the harder modes. There's also a lot of little quality of life things that the game could do but ignores - there are no auto-moving cards to matches, nor are there any hints available.

This version of Spider Solitaire is about as bare-bones as you're going to get. That doesn't make it a bad game, it just doesn't make it the very best version of something that's simple. If you're looking to simply sit down and play a classic game, though, you're going to have a good time with this iteration.