Luxor Solitaire (PC)

Luxor. Known today as a city rich with the ruins of Egypt’s heyday, this settlement on the Nile River had to have been built somehow. It is now your task to build a capital worthy of the ancient Egyptian gods, gathering scarabs so you may construct the wonderful structures we can now only view as historical sites in reality. However, building up your city won’t be easy, for the only way to get these scarabs is to play solitaire.

Luxor Solitaire may be about building up a glorious city of the past, but the path to getting there is actually predetermined. Existing more as a measurement of your progress than a city builder, the core focus of the game is the card game that you’ll be playing to find the scarabs. Luxor Solitaire takes the form of what I call structured solitaire, where goals are set to work towards as you play solitaire with different arrangements of cards and extra gimmicks. In Luxor Solitaire, there are 120 unique layouts on offer, each one placing the cards in play in a set style on the board. Most of the cards begin face down, with a few cards on top you can see properly that, when eliminated from the board, will reveal whatever cards it was on top of. In Luxor Solitaire, you do not necessarily need to clear every card from the board to beat a level. A few Scarab cards exist at the bottom of the many piles or arrangements, the player usually needing to clear most of the board to get to them but a little leeway allowing players to squeak by on the harder stages. However, clearing the board entirely is not pointless, as not only does each stage have a three star rating system that rewards completion, but the player can earn coins for doing things like clearing entire boards or clearing many cards in a row.

Luxor Solitaire uses a pretty easy to understand version of solitaire for its card elimination. At the bottom of the screen you have a deck that you can flip through, the player needing to use whatever card from their deck is face-up to eliminate a card that is one higher or one lower on the board and able to continue eliminating them in a sequence until there are no more eligible cards. If you reach the end of your deck without clearing everything on the board though, the level will end, so the player will want to be observant and try to pick the best possible route with the cards on offer. As far as I can tell from experimentation, there do not appear to be any doomed arrangements even though the cards in play are somewhat random each run of a level, but there does usually seem to be a point where you will have to make the call on how you will match your deck card with the options in play that makes it hard to see if my choosing of the wrong path was the source of a level failure. It feels fair at least, and there are many moments where an apparent chain has been formed where you can get a sequence of cards off the board in a moment of helpful arrangement curating.

Another common feature of structured solitaire games are cards with special conditions for removal, and Luxor Solitaire brings four main types to the table. If you encounter a card covered in mummy wrappings, it will need to be eliminated on two separate occasions to fully remove it from the board. If it is covered in plants or encased in stone though, you will need to eliminate other cards to either get the blade needed to cut through the plants or a hammer that can shatter the rocks and make those cards available for sequencing. Most stages involve the mixture of normal cards with these three obstructions, some incredibly challenging arrangements coming from trying to perfectly plan how to get to necessary cards or make the matches to open up the way to more potential sequencing options, and while these types appear early on, their combination with more difficult layouts ensures that Luxor Solitaire keeps an interesting mix of variety until all its stages have been cleared. The fourth type of special card can be a bit rough to interact with though. Certain cards will have locks on them that will require the player to make a sequence of matches in a row before flipping on to the next card in their deck. In some stages this can seem downright impossible, especially when there are few face-up cards to work with at the start to make these combos with, so while it may not be possible to definitively state certain arrangements may be randomly doomed, these stages can certainly feel that way. Luckily, the majority of stages don’t hit this snag, but even the ones that do can be helped along by a few special skills you have in your corner.

In addition to one free use of the undo button per level, the gold you collect from clearing a stage can be used to purchase special boost items. While there are five on offer, you can only bring three into a stage, but you can mix and match these as freely as you like such as tripling up on a particularly useful power. In addition, if you don’t use your boosters in a stage, you can just carry them on to future levels until you decide to use them. Most of them are pretty useful and will even have levels where they’re clearly a good option if you need the help, things like a card that can match with anything, a booster that eliminates two random cards from the board, an extra undo, and a booster that adds five more cards to the deck all opening up options to keep going when you need an extra push or might have doomed yourself otherwise. The last booster simply lets you see what card is coming up next in your deck, and while this can help you plan whether to go high or low with a current bit of sequencing, it does seem weaker comparatively. Most of the boosters do have decent limitations to prevent them from being overpowered such as the two-card eliminator’s randomness while also making success more likely if you do use them, and the fact you need to buy them makes them valuable enough not to use frivolously. You can accrue many coins over the course of play, but not enough that you can afford to waste them. You can always earn more by replaying old stages if you want to build up reserves for a hard level, so the booster system remains a helpful and accessible part of play without undermining the level designs.

The Egyptian theming makes for a nice touch as well, the backgrounds all evoking images of the ancient society and areas like the Nile. Like many other solitaire games, Luxor Solitaire designs the backgrounds to be nice to look without being distracting, hence why it also offers them as wallpapers for your desktop background. The game even gives you a few different customization options for the patterns on your card backs, but there are a few obvious areas for improvement. During a level you can’t really go back to the level select screen unless you lose, and while retrying a level is an option in the pause menu, you can’t easily buy new boosters and try again. To get rid of boosters you don’t want to use you also have to just burn them in a level, meaning that you’re making a small commitment when you buy them. Admittedly it doesn’t hurt too much to just spend them in a stage so you can buy new ones you do need, but it does feel like a few extra options wouldn’t hurt the game either. To that end though, the game offers a time limit mode for extra difficulty that is by no means required, the player needing to make a move in ten seconds or they’ll be forced onto the next card in their deck. While it can still be played without a timer for some relaxed solitaire fun, the completely optional timed mode is a nice touch for someone looking to make their solitaire play a mite more challenging.

THE VERDICT: For someone looking to try out the structured solitaire genre, Luxor Solitaire is a pretty good starting point. Its level structure is a good fit for marking progress even before the city building goals come into play, with each stage being obviously distinct due to predetermined layouts for the cards. The special card types ensure that there are different objectives to work towards in a stage besides just clearing everything from the board, with the star system and coin rewards adding extra layers to completion besides just collecting the scarabs for building Luxor. The booster system is probably the highlight, the expected extra abilities like clearing cards or having a joker that can match with anything requiring you to use the fruits of your hard work to buy the few you can bring into a stage. While it is fairly standard structured solitaire for the most part, it does balance its difficulty well and has a nice Egyptian theming that makes it enjoyable and visually interesting.

And so, I give Luxor Solitaire for PC…

A GOOD rating. While Luxor Solitaire isn’t really innovating within its genre, it’s got all the expected parts of structured solitaire that make it a relaxing and enjoyable activity. Even some of the elements its carried over from other structured solitaire games are given small twists here, like the special abilities being tied to money you earn for playing the game better, incentivizing improvement so you can use those boosters in the stages that require some careful maneuvering to get around special cards and difficult layouts. While the booster system is perhaps the more easily identifiable ingredient for making Luxor Solitaire more than just matching cards, the level system also contextualizes things really well. You know going in you have a certain amount of stages to beat, each one a specific challenge that you can figure out and alter your tactics to overcome. Luxor Solitaire is a card game both for people invested in the genre and casual players because this system is both easy to get into but allows the more devoted player to overcome its challenges through thoughtful use of what the game offers.

Luxor Solitaire is just an extremely solid member of its genre. It’s not generic because of its small alterations to genre staples, and besides a few potential menu options to make things easier, it executes its mechanics well so that a player looking to play some structured solitaire will find this Egyptian-themed twist on it a good fit.