Twelve solitaires, in a browser, for one person. No account, no server, no network — the game is a directory of static files, and everything it remembers about you is in your browser's own storage.
Play it: solitaire.exterkamp.codes
Build and sort — an evening's game, or a quarter of an hour of one.
 Klondike |
 FreeCell |
 Yukon |
 Canfield |
 Spiderette |
 Scorpion |
 Seahaven Towers |
Match and clear — two minutes, standing up.
 Tri Peaks |
 Pyramid |
 Golf |
 Black Hole |
 Aces Up |
It installs to a home screen and plays with the network off. There is no server to lose touch with, so "offline" here is only a question of whether the browser still has the files — and it keeps them.
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The games of arrangement, in the order the menu lists them: Klondike, drawing one card or three. Both are offered and are scored and recorded separately, because they are not the same game — between a fifth and two fifths of deals go out, depending which one you are playing and how well. FreeCell deals all fifty-two face up across eight columns, with four free cells to park a card in. Nothing is hidden, so nothing is luck: of the thirty two thousand deals Microsoft shipped, every one is solvable but #11982. A run of cards moves as far as there is room to shuffle it — one card, plus one for each free cell, doubled for every empty column — which is the rule the whole game turns on. Yukon is Klondike's seven columns with the deck taken away. Any face-up card moves along with every card piled on it, in whatever order those happen to be; only the bottom one has to fit where it lands. Everything is on the table from the first move, so the game is digging — twenty-one cards start face down and the board counts them down instead of a score. Canfield is the gambling one — Richard Canfield sold a deck for fifty dollars and paid five a card for whatever you got home, which worked out in his favour: a hand goes out about one time in thirty. The card turned up first sets the rank all four foundations build from, and both sequences go round the corner, so a foundation counts past the king to the ace and a king goes on an ace. A column moves whole or not at all. The reserve is the game: thirteen cards you cannot see, only the top one is yours, and any column you manage to empty refills from it before you can use it. Spiderette is Spider's game on one deck and seven columns. Build down by rank ignoring suit, but pick up only a run that is all one suit — so every convenient placement is a card buried on purpose. A suit leaves as a finished king-to-ace run, all thirteen at once, and the deck will not deal while any column stands empty. It is here rather than Spider because ten columns of a double deck come out at about thirty-six pixels a card on a phone, and the cards are the game. Scorpion is Yukon's grip with Spider's order. A face-up card comes away with everything piled on it, in whatever state those cards are in, and may only be put down on the same suit one rank higher — so a nine of hearts has exactly one home in the whole deck, and it is very probably buried. There are no foundations: the four suits are assembled in the columns and left lying there, so a finished one goes on occupying its column and three empty columns is all the room there will ever be. The hardest game here. Seahaven Towers is FreeCell's furniture with two rules changed: columns build down in suit, and an empty column takes a king and nothing else. So an empty column is worth nothing unless you are holding a king, a run can never be shuffled through one, and the only room you have is the four cells — two of which start full. Ten columns across a phone means smaller cards; that is the price of seeing all fifty-two at once. And the quick ones, which build nothing and sort nothing: Tri Peaks was the first of these and is the reason there are four. Three peaks of cards, one card face up beside the deck, and any card you can see that is one rank either side of it can be taken — the ranks go round the corner, so an ace follows a king. The whole game is noticing, and it takes two minutes. Pyramid is twenty-eight cards stacked up and taken away in pairs that add to thirteen. An ace is one, a queen twelve, and a king is thirteen on his own, so kings leave alone. Pair two cards in the pyramid by dragging one onto the other, or the card beside the deck with either a pyramid card or the one turned before it. Finding the other half is the game, so nothing here goes looking for it on your behalf. One pass through the deck and no second look, which is why it goes out about once in fifty hands. Golf is a wall of thirty-five cards cleared one rank up or down onto the card beside the deck. Two rules separate it from Tri Peaks and both are about kings: the ranks do not go round the corner, and nothing at all may be played onto a king, so one turned off the deck ends the sequence there and then. Sixteen turns of the deck, no second pass, about ninety seconds, and about one hand in ten goes out. Black Hole is David Parlett's, and it is the best thinking game here. Seventeen fans of three around a single hole that starts on the ace of spades; play any card you can see that is one rank either side of the card lying there, wrapping past the king to the ace. There is no deck, nothing hidden and no way to move a card between fans — so after the deal there is no luck left at all. Eight or nine deals in ten can be won by somebody who plans the whole thing, which makes it the opposite of Golf: a hand you lose is a hand you misplayed. Aces Up deals four cards at a time onto four piles and throws away the lower card whenever two of a suit are showing. An ace beats everything and can never be thrown away, which is where the name and the difficulty come from. The only decision in it is what to move into an empty column. You win about one hand in thirty-five. |
Every game gets a page before the board: what it is, how |
- Tap a card to send it wherever it obviously goes — its foundation if it can go home, otherwise a pile that will take it. An occupied pile is preferred to an empty one, because an empty column is a resource and filling it by accident is how it gets wasted.
- Drag a card, or a run of cards, to say exactly where it goes. The pile under it lights up only where the move is legal; a refused drop snaps back.
- Flick a card up the board and it goes to its foundation, wherever you let go of it. One card at a time, since that is all a foundation takes, and a throw the foundations will not accept costs nothing — it lands as an ordinary drop would have. Games with no foundations have no such gesture, because there would be nothing for it to mean.
- Undo as far back as you like, including past a win. Undoing costs nothing: a score is a measure of the game you played, and an undone move is a game that did not happen.
- Finish appears once every card is face up and the rest of the game is a formality, and plays it out. Only in the games that have such a position: in the Spider family a suit goes home the moment it is finished, so the formality has already been cleared away by the time it would arrive. The cards then fall out of the foundations and bounce off the bottom of the screen, which is the oldest piece of choreography in computer games and the only reason anybody finishes a hand they have already won.
- The stock turns a card whether you press the top of it or the empty slot it leaves behind — the second of those is how the waste goes back to being a deck.
- Menu, and the phone's own back gesture, open a pause menu rather than leaving. A hand in progress lives only on that page — there is no server holding it and nothing written down until it ends — so walking off the board is the one thing here that cannot be undone, and it takes two deliberate presses. The clock stops while the menu is up.
The whole layout sits low, within reach of a thumb, and rises only when a pile grows long enough to need the room.
Windows Solitaire's standard scoring, which is what people mean when they say a solitaire game has a score:
| Waste → tableau | +5 |
| Waste or tableau → foundation | +10 |
| Turning over a tableau card | +5 |
| Foundation → tableau | −15 |
| Turning the deck over again (draw one) | −100 |
| Turning the deck over again (draw three) | −20, after two free passes |
| Finishing | +700000 / seconds, if the game took over half a minute |
The score never goes below zero. There is no time penalty, which Windows had at two points every ten seconds: on a phone a game is put down mid-hand constantly, and a score that drains while the screen is off punishes the interruption rather than the play. The time bonus is the other half of that bargain — finishing quickly is still worth something, thinking slowly is not worth anything at all.
That is Klondike's, and Klondike is the only game here with a score in that sense. Tri Peaks keeps its own: every card taken without turning the deck is worth more than the last, and clearing a peak is worth fifteen.
The other ten have never had a score, and none is invented for them. What the board shows instead is whichever number that game's players actually watch — free cells in FreeCell and Seahaven, cards still face down in Yukon and the Spider family, rows left in the deck in Spiderette, cards left in the reserve in Canfield, cards still standing in Pyramid, Golf and Aces Up. A score bolted onto a game that does not have one is a number that measures nothing.
Games played and won, win rate, best time, fewest moves, average length of a win, current streak and longest streak — kept separately for each game, in your browser's own storage. A game counts as played once you have made a move in it, so dealing a hand, looking at it and dealing another is free.
Clearing your browser's storage clears the record. That is a real limitation and a deliberate one: the alternative is an account, a password, and somewhere for both to live.
The deck is web-nert's, copied rather than shared — see public/cards/ATTRIBUTION.md. The courts are Dmitry Fomin's CC0 English pattern cards; the backs are generated guilloche line work printed over whichever colour you pick; the suits are drawn for the deck rather than taken from a typeface, because in most faces the club and the spade are the same blob at card size and telling them apart is exactly what a card game asks of you.
The fonts came the same way and carry their own licences in public/fonts: Cinzel for display, Jost for text, Archivo for the rank in a card's corner, and Schoolbell for what is written on the record book.
No sound. Nertz has music and this does not — solitaire is the game you play in a waiting room.
Angular for the pages, Phaser for the board, and a hard line between them. One board runs all twelve games; each game is a rules module of pure functions plus a description of where its piles are printed. Adding the twelfth touched two shared files and added three of its own.
npm install
npm start # http://localhost:4200
npm test # the rules, in vitestEverything else — the deploy, the routing, the offline machinery, the tests that drive a real browser — is in DEVELOP.md.
CC0 1.0 — public domain, as far as the law allows. No attribution required, no notice to ship, commercial use and modification both fine. Take the rules modules, take the board, take the whole thing.
CC0 rather than MIT because the deck that made this possible arrived that way. Dmitry Fomin put the court cards in the public domain and every deck theme here is downstream of that; passing it on with a condition attached would be a poor way to say thank you.
Two things in this tree are not covered by it, and cannot be: the fonts in
public/fonts are third-party (three SIL OFL 1.1, one Apache
2.0 — all fine to redistribute, none of them mine to dedicate), and npm install brings in Angular, Phaser and the rest under their own licences.
Everything else — the rules, the board, the art in
public/cards, the words — is CC0.