Forty Thieves Solitaire Collection Reviews

goood

Way too expensive for what is a very unpolished and very limited game. For this sort of money one would expect more games and some options to change things around a little. I bought it on sale for less than half price and I still feel a little ripped off.

I'm going to try each mode and rate them separately. Based on the average score from all the ratings, I'm going to either recommend the game or not.I wrote my reviews based on my own experiences, maybe I've missed some aspect of a game mode that made my time unenjoyable; you might want to take this in consideration. Total score atm: 22/50 (for 5 game modes played) - Ali Baba (0/10) Everything is based on the luck of the draw. Without that luck, the game can't be won. There's also no strategy to be had because you can move any sized stack around however you see fit. The draw pile doesn't redeal; once you've gone through you're stuck with only the top card of the waste pile. This harms the game, imho. If there were a redeal, then you'd have some options. The game is played with a standard deck size (52 cards); most of the cards are on the board already, only 6 or so are in the draw pile; if cards already seem very inaccessible on the board, the the draw pile won't change much. - Busy Aces (8/10) Cool concept. Played with double the deck size (104 cards); you have 12 work spaces, already filled with a card at the start, where you can stack cards per suit (lower cards on top) but only the upper card is playable. There's a draw pile with no re-deal, only the top card of the waste cell is playable. And there are 8 end game spots to put stacks from ace to king on. So the strategy is to open up some of those spaces to easily move cards around and create multiple larger stacks. Because the lowest cards stay on top, they are easily accessible to place on the "end game spots" once the correct cards have been filled in, immediately giving you a new open space to work with. The beginning might be a bit tricky, and in the middle of the draw pile you might want to start remembering which cards have passed and start considering which you should leave in the waste pile and with which you want to fill one of the empty spaces. If you've done well, then the end game is kind of satisfying because its basically just completing the final stacks. What would be a useful feature for this game is the option to automatically move one of the stacks from the "work spaces" to the "end game spots" when the moment presents itself, because it's a lot of clicking otherwise and there's no reason not to move the whole stack anyway. - Deuces (7/10) It's basically the same as Busy Aces but the "end game spots" start with card number 2 instead of the usual aces, and the numbers 2 are already in place at the start of the game. There's also 2 "work spaces" less, so 10 instead of the 12 in Busy Aces. So, still a fun game but I retracted a point, in comparison to Busy Aces, for lack of originality. - Double Rail (6/10) Played with 2 decks (104 cards); 5 workspaces where you can stack cards from high to lower cards regardless of suit, you may move stacks around as you see fit (no matter the order of suits); one draw pile without a re-deal; top card in the waste cell is available for play; you win by building 8 stacks from ace to king of the same suit. This game feels as if there are possibilities to form strategies to mitigate the randomness of the draw pile. You'll need to micromanage the cards on your 5 work spaces (deciding wether to leave 1, 2 or more spaces empty or fill them with a card, not knowing what the draw pile will deliver; also deciding if you'll place a card from the work space on the end game spot will be important because, while in the work space, the card may still be useful for holding cards coming from the draw pile). I haven't been able to successfully complete a game, as of writing on 2022-07-17, but it feels like you'd be able to win without solely depending on the luck of the draw, like in Ali-Baba or Forty Thieves. This been said, the game is not among my favorites: still too much randomness involved and because of the huge deck and the mechanics there's a lot of clicking to be had. Maybe it would be cooler to ease into the game by being able to have more work spaces; to be able to form effective strategies and the joy of winning once in a while :p 5 work spaces is kind of a hard mode of the game, 6 or 7 spaces would be normal and easy mode. - Forty Thieves (1/10) It's a lot like Ali Baba but with double deck size (104 cards) and you can only move the top card of each column, which makes this mode more strategic than Ali Baba (Are you willing to place a card on another because you won't be able to move the card you are placing it on without removing this one again, which means either being able to move this card to an end game spot or moving it to another card with the same suit and sign as the card you've put this one on just now, of which there is only one other?). Even though this game mode has more reason for strategy than Ali Baba, it's just as unplayable. The draw pile doesn't re-deal again and if you have no luck with the board lay-out, you'll practically have no moves. To be honest, this game mode would have even benefitted from the ability to move stacks around. It would've made the game completable, which is still better than wasting time on strategy for a game you can't win anyway. I had a bad feeling about this game when the titular game mode is so bad, luckily I've played Busy Aces and found that there was at least one decent, enjoyable game mode.