Demon Solitaire
Posted 08/22/2008 at 1:11am
| by Susie Ochs

Ante is $50 a hand, and you get $5 back for every card you move to the Foundation piles. As you can see, we're on a bit of a losing streak. A never-ending one.
Demon Solitaire, also sometimes called Canfield, is a real card game. It wasn't invented solely to torture iPhone owners.
Basically, the game is like the standard Klondike solitaire you're probably familiar with, but with some rule tweaks that make it harder to win. As in, really, really, really hard to win—we played over 30 consecutive hands and never won a single time. And in case you're wondering whether we still managed to have fun losing all those games: No, no we didn't.
But it wasn't just our crappy luck or subpar Demon Solitaire skills that sucked the fun out of the experience. The game's squint-inducing graphics seemed pretty low-res. We ran into numerous bugs, too, from a distracting flicker in the game's toolbar to cards that sometimes were dealt out face-down. (Yes, face-down. Meaning you can't see what's on them, yet the game still expects you to play them.) The help was most unhelpful.
If you truly hold a place in your heart for the game of Canfield, we suggest you try Mondo Solitaire instead—its 101 types of solitaire include Canfield, and its graphical polish and lack of bugs make up for all this game's weaknesses. This Demon will be exorcised from our iPhones immediately.
For 99 cents, you should be able to buy a pack of real-life playing cards. And those will be much more fun.
Demon Solitaire COMPANY: Cliff Maier
CONTACT: www.waffleturtle.com PRICE: $0.99
REQUIREMENTS: iPhone or iPod touch with 2.0 Software Update

It's only 99 cents.

It's ugly, buggy, and missing the fun.