Klondike Forever: A Beautiful Game of Solitaire
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Review, Software Saturday Apr 19, 2008One of the complaints you sometimes hear from new Mac users is that there are no games included with the Mac. They think that because Windows includes a few games, the Mac should also. Not everyone wants to play Chess, you know?
Fortunately, this is an easy oversight to remedy. There are some great FREE games out there and today we’re going to tell you about one of them - it is called Klondike Forever and it is one of the best implementations of Klondike Solitaire we have ever seen on any platform. Even at the startup screen you can tell that the design team had someone with considerable graphics skills (Note: Click on any of these images to view them at actual size):
Game play itself is easy, and the layout is beautiful (provided you like the color green):
You can select the screen size, but it hasn’t been updated for larger displays. This is the one issue I found in the software - if you call for full screen play, it will do it BUT it actually temporarily changes your screen size settings. Then when you end the game and it changes back, any other windows you had open are probably not at the position, nor are they the size where you left them. I’m sure this would not be an issue if you normally ran your display at one of the three sizes shown. Alternately, just don’t try to run the game full screen - it will happily give you a window in the dimensions of one of its three supported sizes - or else try to have a few other windows open as possible when you switch to full screen mode.
You can select which items are to be animated, the volume level of sound effects, and select some of the rules to be used:
And this page has more options, and some statistics in the upper left-hand corner:
And if that’s not enough options for you, you can even set a few from the top menu bar:
The web site for the game lists the included features as follows:
- Game rules settings
- Unlimited undo/redo
- Full screen mode
- Highlight playable cards
- Highlight cards of any rank
- Single or double click auto-move
- Sticky click option
- Auto-play to foundations
- Auto-flip face down cards
- Peek at hidden cards
The same company that makes Klondike Forever also offers a couple of other packages - Puzzles Forever is listed as "Jigsaw puzzles brought to life in 3D" and is also free, while Solitaire Forever is a package of "Over 150 solitaire games brought to life in 3D" - however, with the exception of four of the games, these games cannot be freely played until you register. As the site’s FAQ says, "In a nutshell, you get 4 games free, and you can try out all other games, but they will time out after 2 minutes. Registration removes the time limit." I get the impression that Klondike Forever was released freely to show you what the programmers could do, in the hope that you’d want more of their solitaire games.
In any case, Klondike Forever is a beautiful and very configurable game, so what are you waiting for? Go get it, and enjoy it on those rainy summer days when you just need a mental diversion for a while!
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