Solebon Solitaire 4+

It really needs an update!

Are the folks at Solebon paying attention? On iOS, this is the best solitare app. On the Mac, you can see the age. Even running on Sierra, there are performance issues. It is no longer a smooth app. Also, whatever they are using for a random number generator is getting predictable. After a while, I think I figured out the pattern for some of the hands and have successfully predicted the outcome. Also, the scoring system is not on par with the iOS version. While it is solitaire the competing against the best scores for a hand is fun. It would be nice if it was available on the Mac. I will continue to play the iOS version but I am now looking for a new Mac solitaire game (aside from using Windows in a VM).

Developer Response ,

The 2.0 version with 64-bit update for Catalina is available. Download it free from the Mac App Store.

A great game collection with one major flaw

This is truly a great collection of card games, so many games that it's hard to imagine playing them all. I only wanted a regular (Klondike) solitaire game and a Spider Solitare game which were as close to the Windows versions as possible. I read through the history of the company and reviews of this game package, and thought I'd found exactly what I was after. And, in general, I did. But there is one difference in the Spider game from the Windows version which I consider a flaw, and which has made me get a refund for this collection. That is this: when you want to move cards from one pile (tableau) to another, you can only move the bottom card on the sequence, not the entire sequence. So, if you have red 8 - black 7 on one pile, and red 6 - black 5 - red 4 on another, you can't move the entire sequence (red 6 - black 5 - red 4) to the black 7 on the other pile. You can only move the red 4 to another pile (onto a black 5). To me, that is a limitation and design flaw. There are differences in rules between different implementations of the Spider game, but this one is pretty basic, and should be the same as the Windows version. At least, there should be an option to allow this. Unfortunately, this makes the game unplayable to me, and as a result, the entire package is not worthwhile, especially when you have to pay 5 bucks for it. If this is changed in the next version, I'll buy it again. But not until then.

Best Solitaire on both iOS and MacOS

Like golf, solitaire is a game you play against yourself. (Remember the handicap in golf, which results in your playing against your past scores.) In our hyper-competitive world, many developers have tried to turn solitaire into still another form of competitition with others. They compare your results on a game against everyone else's world-wide. As a result, they won’t let you replay a game. For some, that may be great, but for many of us it loses its real essence that way.

Both on iOS and OSX, Solebon gets back to the roots of solitare. You can restart games to try different approaches, something you have great difficulty doing with “real” cards, for examples. It improves your problem solving skills in the process. I have stopped playing all the other solitaire apps on both platforms.

And there are a lot of games ranging in difficulty so you can match both your skill level and your mood.