Recent reviews by zephyrean

These are original solitaire games, all but one of which were included in previous Zachtronics games.

THE BAD:
There's no way to replay or share a deal.
There's no way to look at a face-up card in the stack -- sometimes it matters which specific black or red suit it is.
Some skins aren't easy on the eyes. (You can't change them.)
Music depends on the game and in some games it's tense and sinister.
The game picking menu does not display the real win count (it sits at 0), you have to start a game to see the real number.
Cribbage is an atrocity.

One game in the collection has an undo button. It only undoes the very last turn and is thus useless for "thinking forward" but can save you a misclick.


Sawayama Solitaire: Klondike but fair, open tableau, cards from the deck are dealt three at a time, one pass no redeal final destination, empty spaces take any card or stack. Not always winnable but wins are frequent and satisfying.

Sigmar's Garden: mahjong on a hexagonal board. Very fun. Does NOT include the variant with quintessence.

Proletariat's Patience: a trick-taking solitaire (no foundations) with generous matching rules but some completed sequences (damned aristocrats!) permanently block cells on the board, so moves are plentiful... until they aren't. I don't like the desaturated colors of the skin, these Russian cards look much better IRL (and each suit of face cards has a different portrait). Why'd you ruin a great historical design like that?

Cribbage Solitaire: a boring optimization problem. Apparently the sequence of deals is predetermined, there are histograms showing how well other players did on each deal but you can't replay a deal to try to optimize. The game thus punishes the player for actually playing the game instead of using an alternate interface (such as pen and paper) or writing a solver, then coming back to the game to input the solution. Not satisfying whatsoever. As win records go, the histograms are appalling, players lose the vast majority of games. They're all winnable, but most players clearly don't want to do the "solve elsewhere and turn in your solution" thing.
TL;DR Cribbage is extremely homosexual. Good luck to anyone trying to platinum this.

Cluj Solitaire: another trick-taking solitaire (no foundations), VERY generous matching rules (no suits) but ALL completed sequences permanently block cells on the board.

Kabufuda Solitaire: yet another trick-taking solitaire where you can choose to permanently block either a free slot (if any, then it's gone and that's it) or an empty lane, which gives you a free slot up to a maximum of four. Highly tactical. 4 "difficulty levels" but fair even on the highest difficulty. Cards are very hard to tell apart, stacked cards blend together in a mishmash of geometric shapes; I lost a bunch because I misread the board. Considering the developer worked in accessibility (games for cripples), I almost believe this is a deliberate attempt to own the chuds and prove the benefits of colorblind color schemes and fonts for dyslexics.

Shenzhen Solitaire: 3-suit Freecell-like with movable stacks and dragons which permanently block the free cells once completed. Elegant, polished, great UX and feedback. There's a waterfall of cards if you win! Unfortunately, deals are uneven in difficulty: most are easy, and when you finally get one which isn't, there's no way to replay it.

Fortune's Foundation: this is the exclusive game, so extraordinarily awesome it would be worth the full price as a standalone. (Note: you shouldn't try to play it with physical cards as most random deals aren't solvable -- get this collection or write your own implementation to always get a solvable deal.) Regrettably, the collection also includes Cribbage, so wait for a sale.

2025.09.08: Pedophiles are not a persecuted minority, kthx.

Nothing objectionable in the game itself (for now) but I don't recommend buying it.

As I write this, the game is subjected to homophobic review-bombing and some hilarious counteraction. Indeed, taking cheap shots at incels who are offended that lesbians don't want shriveled pickles and hazardous waste dumps is one of life's great pleasures.

But the game is also actually awesome. The polished controls, interface, and feedback make it a sensory delight to play. It has sparkling wit, genuine human warmth, and aspirational love instead of focus-grouped pomo quirkayyyyness and creepy narcissism of the alphabet soup usual suspects. It's not "good because it makes creeps mad", it makes creeps mad because it's awesome.

This game is hauntingly beautiful. Pure perfection. I hope the ending sucks, then I will be free.

The Interface

As shown, it's a solitaire card game. Cards are laid onto the table, and the main interactions happen via a number of verb timer pods, like Work or Dream or Study. Put card(s) into a pod, start the timer, and in 30 to 60 seconds (depending on the action) open the pod and take the cards out. Like a microwave.

A very obvious, easy and functional approach to interface design would be to split the gaming area into sections, like it's done in tabletop games: cards laid out in the "hand" area (which can be in the center of the table), auto-sorted, and moved by clicking or dragging to the verbs, the products falling back to the hand. Instead, pods have to be clicked open and closed, and cards taken out one by one. (You can click twice to remove the whole lot, but then you'll have to look for them around the table, over or under other cards).

Once you start a pod, the action can't be cancelled and the spent resources unspent. You also can't set a pod to automatically intiate the same action over and over - everything you do has to be done by hand. For penalties, however, the opposite is true - Time Passes (which simulates the cost of living) and random bad pods launch automatically and steal cards from actions already in progress, causing said actions to quietly fail.

So, from the get-go, this is a digital card game that's strictly worse than a physical card game in every aspect, by design. The interface is meant to hinder and punish you, and screw you if you're disabled.


The Math

The centerpiece if the table and the bane of your existence is the Time Passes pod. It auto-refreshes and steals a Funds card every 60 seconds of in-game time. If it doesn't find a Funds card, it produces Hunger (that needs to be countered with another Funds card before it expires and contributes to a loss condition). So your primary objective is to create new Funds cards faster than that.

New characters have a choice of two jobs. One is menial labo(u)r, and, if you are lucky to kickstart it without randomly falling prey to Injuries and dying, it produces 1 Funds in 50 seconds (45 if you exploit an interface "glitch" - I hesitate to call it a bug, because the game will become even less playable if and when it's fixed).

The Work pod doesn't autorestart, so you have to pause the game as soon as it's done, or this work cycle loses you money. If you manage to do that in, say, 2 seconds, you get 8 seconds of game time out of every game minute which contribute to you actually earning Funds to spend on your cult. (Many people have faster reaction times, but consider you need to sustain it and give that pod your attention throughout the game. You WILL forget about it, and your average WILL go up.)

Add the time you need to use the Work pod to destroy penalty cards before they overwhelm you and the time spent loading and unloading card from it (on pause), and you're looking at 1 useful Fund per 15 minutes of real time. That's 4 possibly productive actions in an hour of frantic clicking.

(There's a 2x speed button, but it eats into your reaction time and penalties pop up twice as fast, so the end result is about the same for twice as much clickling.)

The other job is a trap. It looks to be more profitable, but the pod randomly adds an extra Work cycle before Funds can be disbursed, AND the job card expires after 60 seconds of not working and you need to spend more unpaid Work time getting rehired. Incidentally, a Work action that prevents Dread from building up is also 60 seconds, so you either die to poverty or mounting Dread.

For the other job to be at all profitable, your minion has to kill the boss. Minions are rare, and a named minion (you can also fail at recruiting, or get an anonymous pawn) has a 1 in 8 chance to be a combatant who might succeed (but most likely won't).

Recruiting attempts attract investigators, who you can't deal with until and unless you have a large stable of upgraded minions / summons. Before that, you're completely at the mercy of the RNG. Upgrading minions and of course summoning spirits requires a lot of appropriate Lore, bought at random with Funds (hope you don't get a mundane book, or one in a language you don't know)... you see where it's going.


The Story

The story is designed as badly as everything else. Microfiction on Magic: the Gathering cards can be awesome, but no one reads it while playing Magic -- it's for collectors, to savor when you aren't actually at the table. Here, the urgency of the mundane grind cycle completely overpowers the flavo(u)r text. It is badly presented, too, with the narrative, game rules and hints all in a single paragraph in the same blue-on-blue blurry font.

Furthermore, unlike, say, Paradox games praised for their emergent storytelling, here there is simply not enough content, and what is there you have to repeat over and over until you get sick of it. Experiment! It's 4 experiments per hour, tops, and some can fail during prep, and some can fail when a bad pod steals an ingredient, and some can fail because a later stage requires an ephemeral card and you haven't ground enough of them, and some can just silently fail and you will never know they give a must-have card on a very rare success.

There's no joy of serendipity and discovery; nothing really emerges. Mastering the game requires knowing everything beforehand: "okay, first I power through the health grind, then I establish this cult, then I kill the wage-stealing lawyer, then I do this and this and that" -- a successful session is one where you have a plan before you even begin playing and follow it to the letter, and a failed one is when you follow the same plan but lose to a glut of random penalties. This, of course, is exactly the opposite of what the game claims to want to simulate. You're not an occult researcher, you're an data entry worker with a spreadsheet.


The TL;DR

It is a realistic cult sim, the cult in question being an MLM pyramid: recruit innocents, lie to them about limitless self-actualisation (zelf-actualization), prey on your downline, avoid The Man, reinvest all your money into new random inventory, go bankrupt, kill yourself. If you're thinking about joining one, buy this game instead: it's way cheaper than a real MLM entry package and will possibly save your life. Otherwise, avoid it like crabs.

(v 1.0 playtime: ~8 hours.)

It's infected with GRIDS now.