Freecell

Title           Freecell (Darryl Hartwig's Version)
Publisher       Darryl Hartwig (freeware)
Game Type       Strategy
Players         1
HD Installable  Yes
Compatability   All Amigas
Submission      Dennis Smith 

Review
Freecell is a solitaire card game. Patience? Who has time for that?
There's too much luck involved. If the cards come out right, you can win;
if they don't, you lose.

And then there's Freecell. A challenging patience game in which 99.99% of
all deals can be solved. Basically, you've got a random dealing of cards,
and you have to pile them up in suits, ace to king. Sounds just like any
patience game, doesn't it? There are eight columns of cards, and you can
move a card at a time into one of four freecells (which can hold a single
card only), or on to other columns, red on black, in descending order,
just like Klondike/Solitaire except that you can only move one card at a
time, not whole runs of them. This sounds impossible but once you get a
few free cells or an empty column, you can move large runs of cards
together Towers-of-Hanoi style. It's seldom easy, almost always solvable,
and as such, it's the most captivating solitaire game around. Ideal for
those spare moments while you're waiting for a CD to burn, an image to
render, or just something to waste an evening or ten with.

PC owners have been able to enjoy Freecell for some years now, the game
being given away with Windows. Until recently, there was no freely
available Amiga version that could compete. OK, there's amyfreecell
(aminet:game/think/amyfreecell.lha), which is reasonable, opens on any
public screen and features innovative scalable cards. Unfortunately,
unlike the PC versions, it can't automatically do the Towers-of-Hanoi
thing to move a run of cards from one column to another, and that's a real
letdown, because that's the one bad thing about Freecell.

But now we have Darryl Hartwig's version, which does so this, eliminating
all the card-by-card slogwork and leaving you to enjoy the mental
challenge of solving the game. And it does so much more. As well as doing
all the PC things - keeping stats on your performance, doing the hard
work, telling you when you can't make any more moves - it can save games
in progress, save your solutions and replay them, has multiple undo for
cheating - sorry, I mean solving - purposes, has variations on the normal
rules, can keep several stats files, allows you to build custom layouts,
and the random number generator gives you billions more games.

Get the latest version of this fine implementation of Freecell from
aminet:game/board/FreeCell*.*.lha and you'll never need another solitaire
game.

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