The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire (PC)

When it comes to making a decent structured solitaire game, developers have a pretty low bar to clear. So long as the card game is functional, you can usually find yourself with an acceptable game, a few little gimmicks and the different layouts on top helping to keep the game from growing stale. Considering I had played a previous title in the Far Kingdoms series, Age of Solitaire, it felt reasonable to assume The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire would be just as decent but with a seasonal flair. However, it instead shows that you can end up hurting a solid card game if your gimmicks aren’t well constructed.

The fundamentals of the structured solitaire design are intact of course. A round of play involves the player flipping through a personal deck of cards one by one with the traditional playing card set of four suits that number Ace through Ten and include Jacks, Queens, and Kings. Based on whichever card is currently displayed, you can remove a card from the field so long as it numbers one higher or lower in sequential order, the player able to continue the chain of action as the removed cards replace the displayed cards in the deck area. The play field contains the remainder of whatever cards aren’t in your deck, arranged in shapes and piles where only a few will be face up and eligible for removal at a time. By removing a card on top of a face down card though, you are able to flip it over, opportunities opening up as you work your way through the current level’s layout. A round of solitaire ends when either the play field is completely cleared of cards or you are unable to make any more moves after flipping through your deck. On its own this style of play is pretty good for casual but mildly thoughtful play, a player able to succeed frequently enough without too much trouble but benefiting if they weigh what choice to make when there are multiple eligible cards in play and keeping track of what cards they’ve already seen allowing for greater success.

There aren’t any issues with the basics here, but the structure and gimmicks in The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire are what does it in. The player’s goal in Winter Solitaire isn’t really to clear the board but to uncover rubies hidden beneath the piles of cards. The story involves an evil Ice Queen freezing over many fantasy kingdoms, these containing many of the expected races and creatures common to the genre like elves, dwarves, giant spiders, and dragons. The only hope for this world of magic and monsters is the Princess whose amulet can thaw things out so long as it has enough rubies to charge its power. Ten rubies are needed to clear the twenty levels of Winter Solitaire (although the Steam page claims there are fifty for some reason), these levels consisting of five rounds where the layouts aren’t particularly inspired or unique but do their job well from a gameplay standpoint. The play field usually contains around three rubies per round, this allowing players to get a good haul if they can clear it but there are extras just in case you need to finish a round without getting them all, but it soon becomes clear the game is too generous with how ruby accumulation can be done. There is a retry option after a round whether you did poorly or did perfectly, and if you chose it, you get to replay the layout with new cards but with the rubies you collected carrying over. This means there is essentially no reason to ever lose a level since you can just keep retrying rounds until you have enough rubies, and if there are challenging layouts in a level’s set, you can do as poorly as you like with no repercussions since you can just scoop up all the required items in a single repeated layout if need be.

Even if you do choose to ignore this undermining feature and try to snag the rubies without replays, you’ll find the gimmicks on feature don’t really help Winter Solitaire much and sometimes outright hurt it. Sometimes beneath a pile of cards you’ll instead find gold, and on top of an end of round cash bonus, it can be spent on special items that can be used once per round. Some of these are definitely helpful like the ability to remove one face-up card from the play area, but the key is outright overpowered. Some cards in the play area will be locked when a round starts, the player needing to find a key underneath one of the other piles to open it up and begin utilizing those cards. However, once you purchase the key item, something that is certainly possible well before you even encounter locked cards, you can completely negate this gimmick every round. There are a few different items in the shop for purchase that you might buy instead, but buying an extra undo chance when you already have a free one can’t compare to bypassing a limiting gimmick. These one use items are all stored in a brown satchel at the top of the screen that the game never tells you about or draws your attention to, but no matter how well you play, it is almost impossible you’ll have every brown satchel item by the end. The gold accumulation is very slow even if you repeat levels again and again, and once you do complete the game, the only way to keep playing Winter Solitaire is to start over, losing all progress and all the items you purchased. There are at least some freebie powers you get along the way, four characters giving you powers that need a few rounds to recharge but can execute effects like eliminating two random cards from the play area. The last power gimmick though is poorly conceived, the player able to purchase cards from a frog that can be used whenever you like as your active matching card. However, these cost gold and can be any number or face card, meaning that you have to expend an all too valuable resource on a card that likely won’t be what you need, meaning this option can quite easily fade into the background once you realize its futility.

The power up distribution, gold management, and ruby exploitation are all flaws without a doubt, but the thing that pushes The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire below the bar of acceptability is actually the ice. While the ice contributes well to the backdrops you see while playing, many lovely ice-covered locations making up the scenery even if none really pack a wow factor, its involvement in the gameplay only hampers the experience. Frozen cards can only be played with if you expend a ruby to unfreeze them, and sometimes the frozen cards can appear in the first round of a new level, meaning you’ll not be able to thaw those cards out for quite a bit.  While many structured solitaire games will lock some cards away until you can perform some task or use the right item, Winter Solitaire even repeating this idea with the easily overcome lock, the ice ends up feeling incredibly annoying, especially since it becomes overused. Having hardly any cards you can select leads to slow, bothersome flips through the deck as you find worthless cards, the process of wasting so many cards never feeling good. If you have a ruby to spend, you then can play the round regularly, but at the same time, if you know of the ruby farming trick, the ice levels are sometimes just better off skipped. Find a round where play is more open and get your treasures there, but if you do want to ignore the farming trick, you then are punished as you have to play rounds where you waste this valuable resource to even make the structured solitaire enjoyable at all.

It seems like almost every little gimmick, even the usually tried and true ones featured in many members of the genre, are flubbed here in at least some small way, and the last little twist isn’t better off. Between some levels you will have to do hidden object games where a certain number of objects will be placed on a screen and the player needs to click on them, although calling these items hidden is charitable. The objects are so obvious and often completely at odds with the background they’re placed against that these sections will be over in just a few seconds. They are almost too simple to be upset with since they’re so bereft of substance they can hardly be called gameplay. Even mentioning them feels akin to telling someone they have to open doors to move throughout a house, the act itself so empty that it doesn’t really provide anything that influences the greater experience. While they don’t hurt the experience by existing, they are the last misstep in a game whose every attempt to do something outside of typical structured solitaire stumbles in some way.

THE VERDICT: While its basic elements are as sound as any other game of structured solitaire, The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire messes up almost every gimmick it introduces to play. The rubies you need to win are easily farmed, the ice gimmick makes you pick between a frustrating round or spending a resource, the gold accumulation speed limits power up experimentation, and the hidden object screens are so easy they might as well not be there. Sure, you have the genre gameplay intact and the icy backdrops look nice while you play, but the additions to the formula either undermine the gameplay or add some annoyance to what could have otherwise been a typical but tolerable experience.

And so, I give The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire for PC…

A BAD rating. The standards for structured solitaire are pretty low since all you really need to do is make sure the casual core gameplay isn’t obstructed, but The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire’s ill-conceived gimmicks are surprisingly annoying considering this isn’t even the first solitaire game in the series. The ice definitely exemplifies it most of all. If you choose not to farm rubies it will force you to spend an important item to even be able to play the round properly, but if you can’t afford it or choose when to use the rubies poorly, you’ll have to repeat things as if you were ruby farming anyway. The design doesn’t favor regular play, and with the slow build up of gold over the course of the game, even the helpful power ups come with a price that isn’t enjoyable to pay. The game seems to restrict you far too often while also being heavily exploitable in parts, and while you can sometimes squeak out some decent rounds of solitaire, you’ll soon be looking at power-ups and gimmickry again and feeling how at odds they seem to be with the general game design.

The Far Kingdoms: Winter Solitaire could be swept up pretty easily, again probably a testament to how structured solitaire games don’t need too many working elements to be decent. Beef up the hidden object scenes to provide some challenge, increase gold accumulation to allow for more interesting power up and card purchasing decisions, reduce the presence of the ice hazard, but perhaps most importantly, fix the ruby system. It’s currently too easy to exploit but also annoying to manage if you don’t, and while rejiggering these systems might leave Winter Solitaire feeling like a generic structured solitaire game, that would be preferable to a game that mostly annoys a player with its restrictions and undercooked gimmicks.