Excellent Card Games

Five card games are brought to life in this title – Baroness (AKA Five Piles), Frustration, Yukon, Stonewall and Black Maria. The basic game mechanics offer straightforward visuals, a range of card sets, saveable statistics, and click-to-drop or drag-and-drop control options.

Black Maria is a three-player game, which is similar to Hearts but with the opposite objective – i.e. you must hold the hearts and queens. The others are all solitaire, with Baroness and Frustration being largely luck based and involving matching cards up so they add to 13 in Baroness (aces low; kings go automatically) or 10 in Frustration (face cards pair with cards from the same rank).

Stonewall and Yukon both involve getting the cards to the foundations, which are built up in suit, and moving cards on the main play area (the ‘tableau’) by playing, for example, a red nine on a black 8. Yukon is a famed strategic game, notable for allowing multiple cards to be moved even if they aren’t in sequence, and presenting some cards face-down and some face-up, while Stonewall alternates the cards, with a face-up one on top of a face-down one.