Solitaire Games

Goodsol Newsletter #67 - Fan Games

Goodsol Newsletter #67
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<http://www.goodsol.com>


Action Solitaire Update
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<http://www.actionsol.com>

A new version of Action Solitaire is now available. Version 0.91 fixes some bugs from version 0.90 and adds a new game - Double Pyramid.

Action Solitaire is a collection of 23 solitaire games that are played in a new way. Unlike regular solitaire, Action Solitaire is played for points against the clock in timed rounds.

Download the free 30 day trial of Action Solitaire
<http://www.actionsol.com/download.html>

Action Solitaire is a whole lot of fun. I highly recommend giving it a try, it is different from Pretty Good Solitaire but very addicting. Action Solitaire has quick, easy games like Pyramid, Triple Towers, and Fourteen Out, but also adds challenges to solitaire classics like FreeCell, Spider, and Klondike.


Featured Games - Fan Type Games
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Fan type games are one of the classic groups of solitaire games. In Pretty Good Solitaire, there are currently 28 different solitaire games of this type.

The basic game of the type is the game Fan. It gets its name because the deck is dealt out in fans of three cards each. Most of the games of the type feature fans of three or perhaps four cards, usually with all of the cards dealt face up and only the top card of each fan available for play.

In Fan, the objective is to build four foundations piles up in suit from Ace to Kings. In the fans building is down by suit, one card moved at a time. The primary problem you are faced with when playing Fan is a lower ranked card buried beneath a higher ranked card of the same suit. This situation will block you from winning unless you can play the higher ranked card somewhere else in order to access the lower card.

While Fan is a good game, other games of its type are more popular. The two most popular fan type games are La Belle Lucie and Three Shuffles and a Draw. In both of these games, shuffles are added to aid in unblocking cards. When play comes to a standstill, you can click on the empty stock pile to reshuffle the fans. All the cards in the fans are picked up, shuffled, and dealt back out three cards to a fan. In Three Shuffles and a Draw, after the third shuffle (second redeal), you can draw any buried card out of a fan and move it to the top of a fan. This makes the game even easier by letting you get rid of a block.

Our new Action Solitaire game features two fan type games adapted to its action round format. Fast Fan is the action version of La Belle Lucie. The cards are dealt out in fans of three cards as in most fan games. Your objective is still to build four foundation piles up from Ace to King, but in Action Solitaire's Fast Fan you want to score as many points as possible. You get 500 points for moving each card to the foundations, 2000 more points for completing a 13 card suit on the foundations, and 10000 more points for moving all the cards to the foundations. Plus you must complete the round before your time bonus points run out.

In Fast Fan, there are unlimited redeals, but you lose points for each redeal. The first redeal costs you 1000 points, the second 2000 points, and so on. You can always complete the foundations in Fast Fan if you use enough redeals (and if you have enough time), but the redeals will get costly in terms of points if you use too many.

Another fan type game in Action Solitaire is Free Fan. Free Fan is just like Fast Fan, but adds two free cells. You can store any one card in each cell. Because each fan has three cards, by having two cells you can use the cells (assuming they are both empty) to access any buried card in any fan. This means that in Free Fan you do not need to rely on costly redeals to retrieve blocked cards buried in a fan. As long as you are able to keep your cells available, you can free all the blocked cards.

Fans of La Belle Lucie, Three Shuffles and a Draw, and even FreeCell will find the new Free Fan a very interesting game. The cells add opportunities for the skillful player to deal with any difficult position. I highly recommend all fan type game players to give Free Fan a try.

Fan, La Belle Lucie, and Three Shuffles and a Draw are among the 560 solitaire card games in Pretty Good Solitaire, which can be downloaded from <http://www.goodsol.com/download.html>. Fast Fan and Free Fan are among the 23 solitaire card games in Action Solitaire, which can be downloaded from <http://www.actionsol.com/download.html>.

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Thomas Warfield - Software Designer - [email protected]
Anne Warfield - Order Fulfilment - [email protected]

©2003 Goodsol Development Inc.
Pretty Good Solitaire, Action Solitaire, Pretty Good MahJongg, FreeCell Wizard, Spider Wizard, and more. Visit us at <http://www.goodsol.com>.

To subscribe from the Goodsol Newsletter go to
<http://www.goodsol.com/newsletter.html>. 

Goodsol Newsletter #66 - Action Solitaire

Goodsol Newsletter #66
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<http://www.goodsol.com>


Action Solitaire
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<http://www.actionsol.com>

Dear Solitaire Players,

We are excited to announce the release of our newest solitaire game. This solitaire game is rather different from Pretty Good Solitaire, but we hope you'll find it as fun and addicting to play as we do. Our new game is called Action Solitaire.

Action Solitaire is solitaire as an arcade game. Unlike regular solitaire, Action Solitaire is played for points against the clock in timed rounds.

Your objective is to get the highest score possible and advance to the next round. Each round has a goal score that you must achieve. If you make the goal score, you will advance to the next round. If you do not make the score, you lose. See how many rounds you can play and how high a score you can get!

Action Solitaire has 22 different games. Play fast action games such as Triple Peaks, BlackJack Speed, and Picking Pairs. Play solitaire classics like FreeCell, Klondike, Spider, Pyramid, Golf, and Yukon, all like you have never seen them before.

A Practice Mode lets you learn a game without the clock and your score won't count in the statistics. Action Solitaire uses the same card sets as Pretty Good Solitaire (if you have extra card sets installed for Pretty Good Solitaire, you can just copy the .dat card set files from the Pretty Good Solitaire to the Action Solitaire folder and you will then be able to select them in the Options menu in Action Solitaire). For super fast play, Action Solitaire can be played entirely with the keyboard. Great for extra speed or for laptops with slow mice.

Download the free 30 day trial of Action Solitaire
<http://www.actionsol.com/download.html>

Order Action Solitaire
US$24.95, optional $7.50 shipping for a CD-ROM
<http://www.actionsol.com/orderonline.html>
Free upgrades through the 2005 version!

More information about Action Solitaire
<http://www.actionsol.com>

How to play timed rounds
<http://www.actionsol.com/timedrounds.html>

List and description of the 22 games in Action Solitaire
<http://www.actionsol.com/games.html>

If you are a long time Pretty Good Solitaire player, it takes some time to get used to playing solitaire against a clock. But I find this game very fun. I suggest starting out with some of the simpler addition or tower games, such as Pyramid, Get 11, or Triple Towers. You need to note the scoring systems in each game, as that greatly affects your strategy (press F1 in each game for the rules, or click on the help button on the toolbar). Triple Peaks looks just like Triple Towers, for instance, but the scoring makes the best strategy very different. Similarly, the scoring system really affects how you play Picking Pairs.

We have a discussion area for Action Solitaire on our discussion forum at <http://www.goodsol.net/forum>. Feel free to ask questions there or share strategies on how to win the games. We would also love to hear your suggestions for new games or features to add.

The current version of Action Solitaire is beta version 0.90. This version of Action Solitaire is working very well, but we are calling it a beta because there is one big feature we still want to add.

We want to add an online scores submission component, where you can submit your top scores to the web site. We think this is a very important feature for this game, since the whole object of the game is to get as high of a score as possible. Once you play a few games, you'll see why being able to compare your scores to others is important for Action Solitaire.

While we have a score submission system for Pretty Good Solitaire, we want to make the submission of scores in Action Solitaire even better by making the scores lists update in real time, that is, right after you submit, rather than waiting for us to update the list every couple of weeks as we do with Pretty Good Solitaire.

This is going to take some extra work and time, but we think it will be well worth it and make Action Solitaire a better game. While we are working on this new feature we will be updating Action Solitaire often, adding new games as we work on the online scores. When we have the online scores complete and working, then we'll do a version that will be version 1.0.

In the meantime, Action Solitaire will keep all your scores. When version 1.0 is available, you'll be able to update to it and use the new online scores submission to submit your scores, even games you played in versions before version 1.0. And of course if you buy before version 1.0 is available, it will be a free update (as will all new versions to the end of 2005).

And best of all, when we get the new online scores system working in Action Solitaire, we will then add it to Pretty Good Solitaire and Pretty Good MahJongg as well.

I hope you find Action Solitaire as addicting as I do. It's been hard getting any work done around here because I keep playing it. The game has worked out so well that we plan to expand it significantly in the coming years, just as we did with Pretty Good Solitaire. Some games work better in the action format than others (addition type games and games like Golf seem the work the best), but there's obviously a lot potential to convert regular solitaire games over to this new way of playing. Give it a try and download Action Solitaire from <http://www.actionsol.com/download.html>.

Sincerely,
Thomas Warfield
[email protected]


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Thomas Warfield - Software Designer - [email protected]
Anne Warfield - Order Fulfilment - [email protected]

©2003 Goodsol Development Inc.
Pretty Good Solitaire, Action Solitaire, Pretty Good MahJongg, FreeCell Wizard, Spider Wizard, and more. Visit us at <http://www.goodsol.com>.

You can subscribe to the Goodsol Newsletter at <http://www.goodsol.com/newsletter.html>.