I mean, yes, it is absolutely true that the mobile market is a harsh one. These are guilt trips to the player who doesn’t want to pour money into the game. Sadly, many of these challenges…are not really “challenging.” Yes, it is absolutely worth the effort to try to win a game in under a minute (hello, auto-move, this is what you were built for!) or over 10 minutes (just leave the thing running, I guess?), to win a lot of games in deal-3 mode…but is it really worth an achievement to have bought more than 80 Lucky Boxes? Or getting more than 5 duplicate items? Or buying anything from the in-game store? These are not achievements. In addition to things to win with coins, the game has a number of challenges that you can fulfill, which are essentially just Achievements by another name, but these are worth coins as well. Buying Lucky Boxes with your coins (or with real money… sigh) gives you these things at random – and it’s entirely possible to win an item that you already have. ![]() But each deck also has a number of hidden elements that also unlock, such as animated wallpaper, random events that happen on screen under various conditions, and different win animations (because just flinging the cards everywhere is so 1990, apparently, so why not celebrate with a DJ bear, or a dramatic reenactment of the Hot Dog Wars…?). “Deck elements?” See, every deck in Decked Out comes out of the box with the cards themselves (backs and occasionally different face cards) and a color scheme. Whenever you earn enough coins – from random cards or winning games – you spend those coins to open Lucky Boxes, which contain random decks or deck elements. Of course with only one game included, Solitaire Decked Out would get awfully monotonous, which is where the Collection comes into play. The game lacks a standard form of auto-play, but there is a simple auto-move system where cards can be automatically sent to appropriate piles by tapping them (which can be disabled, if you’re a purist), and an auto-complete feature that only happens if you answer “yes” when it asks. Who would answer “no” to this question?ĭecked Out is even a pretty good implementation of Klondike, with options for one-card and three-card deals, and following the less-strict rules that allow partial stacks to be moved, cards to be removed from foundations, and the stock pile to be redealt indefinitely (albeit at the cost of score). ![]() My main Android device, a Nexus 6, is rooted specifically so I can install AdAway and block ads at the OS level. This already grants it several points in my favor, considering that online ads are a massive risk for infection and security breaches. Solitaire Decked Out, on the other hand, is free to download, and free of advertisements of any form. Solitaire on mobile devices is already an extraordinarily crowded market, consisting of everything from bit-for-bit recreations of the Microsoft classic (with dubious legality), to gigantic collections containing more games than most people would know about, and some implementations that focus on flashy graphics and in-app purchases everywhere they can be implemented. Of course, the grim visions of the future of video gaming (cough) are clearly not the focus of Solitaire Decked Out, released for mobile platforms in late 2016. In the wake of those solitaire games with a purpose, the games that have achievements for literally everything and those sorts of games that you pay once for and just own everything in, I’m going to show you a slightly darker side of commercial solitaire.
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