Masque Solitaire Antics

Masque Solitaire Antics is a 1995 DOS collection of patience games, and it is exactly the sort of product that once persuaded people to buy a whole box of card games instead of a single one. There are more than twenty variants inside: alongside the inevitable Klondike you get Yukon, Golf, Canfield, Agnes, Aces Up, Calculation, Easthaven, Demon, Storehouse, Fortune's Favor, Auld Lang Syne, Fascination and Double or Quits.

One thing matters more than the count, and rivals of the day often skimped on it: every variant comes with its own help screen explaining the rules. Most of these games are barely known outside the English-speaking world, and without an explanation you would sit there guessing what is legal. Here you can open the rules, read them and try the layout immediately. Each game also offers three difficulty settings — easier, normal and harder — which in patience usually changes how many cards you may turn or how freely columns can be moved.

Control is mouse only, with cards dragged into place, and the package has one flourish: an animated ant that turns up on screen, most reliably when a game ends. It is a small thing and by the hundredth time it is more irritating than charming, but it is the only attempt the program makes at a personality of its own.

Let us be honest: anyone who only wants Klondike had it built into Windows and needed nothing else. The point of this collection is breadth. If you enjoy hunting for a variant whose logic differs from the one you learned as a child, there is material here for weeks. Otherwise it is a competent but unremarkable deck of cards.

On oldgame.cz the whole collection runs in your browser, with nothing to install.