Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.40

This is our biggest Mac OS X product yet.

PGSME 2.40Goodsol Development has now published Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.40, a significant update to this largest collection of Solitaire games for Mac OS X systems.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition contains 400 different solitaire games in this update, including 25 brand new variations, every one of the games from any of our Mac products, and even Concertina, which is not available anywhere else, on any platform (not even the Windows version of PGS).

In Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition, you can play the widest variety of different kinds of solitaire available for Mac systems, whether you have a brand new system running Mountain Lion (10.8) or a older [PowerPC] system running Tiger (10.4).  Every game provides 2 billion deals and online high scores, as well as full support for climb mode, where deals are played in numerical order for a total score, a fair and direct comparison to other players.  Additionally, you can play game tours including several games for a different challenge.  There is truly something here for everybody.

Fun facts: If you could play one game per second, it would still take you more than 27219 years to exhaust the deals in this game, and that does not even count the 60 bonus games!  More realistically, if somebody played one game of FreeCell every minute, eight hours every day, it would still take 5.7 years to finish the first 1 million deals.

You can download a free 30-day trial version here for Mac OS X 10.4 or later (Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, or Tiger [Intel/PPC]).  Buy a copy here for only $24.95 and you will receive the 60 bonus variants not available in the trial version.  Also, you will receive free upgrades for the foreseeable future, as we add even more new games.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition is our premier solitaire game for Mac OS X, not merely based on our proprietary Goodsol Solitaire Engine, but actually the driving force behind the development of that engine.  This version anchors a new release schedule for PGSME updates, where we plan to add 20 games per month (albeit with a slight holiday interruption next month) until this version contains every game in the Windows version of Pretty Good Solitaire (currently at 792, and counting), as well as Concertina and many more bonus games that are only available in this title.

Curmudgeon Day 2012

I Stayed Home and Did What I Wanted.

Curmudgeon DayI have been writing about Curmudgeon Day for the last 8 years, which posts you can find in the Curmudgeon Day category.  The holiday itself is much older (predating the pretenders), but it has taken on additional significance this year.  This Thanksgiving was the first time one of our guests had to leave early to go into work at a retail outlet, for a midnight opening, under the implied threat of dismissal, making this particular practice a form of quasi-slavery, which must become unprofitable.

Now, I encourage you to join the cause by visiting and liking the Curmudgeon Day page on Facebook.  If you are so inclined, please also post there about your non-shopping activities; I have already done so.

“We now return to our regularly scheduled program.”

FreeCell Plus 4.10

This is a collection with FreeCell and several related games.

FCPlus 4.10 for Windows/MacGoodsol Development has published FreeCell Plus 4.10, a maintenance update to this inexpensive collection of FreeCell and related games, available for both Windows and Mac OS X systems.

FreeCell Plus includes 8 FreeCell-type games, including FreeCell itself, as well as several variations such as Sea Towers, a very popular game, Baker’s Game, the original game of this type, and Penguin, a challenging twist on the genre.

In FreeCell Plus, you can play these most popular “open” games, where every card is visible from the initial deal, putting an emphasis more on strategy, rather than luck, in solving these card puzzles.  The first one million deals of FreeCell are identical to the version shipped with Windows, but our game extends this to 2 billion deals, and the other games with the same general layout, Baker’s Game, Spidercells, and Two Cells (as well as three of the bonus games) use compatible deals.  Playing in climb mode, you can challenge yourself sequentially to each deal of this game that is winnable in more than 99.99% of deals (and play 11981 before reaching the first unwinnable one).

You can download a free 30-day trial version here for either Windows 8/7/Vista/XP or Mac OS X 10.4 or later (Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, or Tiger).  Buy a copy here for only $9.95, and receive 4 bonus games not available in the trial version.  Note that there is also a “special code” purchase available to allow FreeCell Plus to be played on all (Windows or Mac) computers in your household.

FreeCell Plus is actually a reboot/replacement of an older version for Windows 3.1 that sold well (unchanged) for more than a decade.  I recreated this version using our proprietary Goodsol Solitaire Engine (and none of the original code or resources), also adding the Quick Launch window.  This is currently the smallest GSE game, with only 12 games in the full version (although there is another game in the pipeline with even fewer, but a more diverse selection), and the iOS version is in active development.

Featured Tweet (#441)

Details: I dropped the iOS Deployment Target to 3.2, and the project built (seemingly) properly for all iPads, but Xcode 4.4.1 refused to actually send the app to the device.  It ran the existing (older) version on the device the first time, and when that was deleted manually, it threw error messages about not being able to find the file. (!)  Cleaning the project did not seem to work, but erasing the intermediates folder did the trick.

Most Popular Solitaire 2.10

This is a wonderful collection of favorite solitaire games.

MPS 2.10Goodsol Development has published Most Popular Solitaire 2.10, a maintenance update to this collection of the most popular solitaire games for both Mac OS X and Windows.

Most Popular Solitaire contains 30 games, including the most common varieties such as Klondike (a.k.a., “Solitaire”), Spider, and FreeCell, as well as more unusual forms of patience such as Crazy Quilt.  This version greatly improves the interface for selecting and organizing games.

In Most Popular Solitaire, you can play a wide variety of different types of solitaire, giving a taste for various forms of gameplay and allowing you to decide (and mark) your favorites.  Here is a quick sampling: Pyramid is very popular, involving removal of pairs of cards to reveal other cards and clear the layout; Forty Thieves is enormously popular, involving the proper selection of cards and use of tableau spaces; Aces Up (which I learned more than 40 years ago as “Idiot’s Delight”) involves eliminating lower card ranks until only the four Aces are left; Canfield is a historical game with some cards needing to be unburied from a reserve; Golf is based on removing cards by building up and down on the waste pile; La Belle Lucie is a favorite game of mine of the Fan variety; Cruel is an interesting form of solitaire made popular in the (original) Microsoft Entertainment Pack; Scorpion and Yukon are solitaire games where entire columns of cards are moved regardless of sequence.  I have mentioned fewer than half of the games in this collection; there is truly something here that will appeal to everyone.

You can download a free 30-day trial version for Mac OS X 10.4 or later (Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, or Tiger) or Windows 8/7/Vista/XP.  When you buy a copy here for only $16.95, you get both Mac and Windows versions for one low price.  You also get access to 13 bonus games not available in the trial version.  (The web site says that is less than 57 cents per game, but it could be less than 20 cents per game, considering both platforms and the bonus games.)

Most Popular Solitaire is another one of the games based on our proprietary Goodsol Solitaire Engine; in fact, MPSol 1.0 was the original source for GSE, as well as the first version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition.  It was originally introduced, more than 7 years ago, as an alternative product for those solitaire players who were a little overwhelmed by the hundreds of games in PGS (for Windows); however, my design and programming approach (and tools) were enough different from the flagship product that, while the deals are the same, the playing experience is certainly different.

Pretty Good MahJongg 2.41 / ME 2.02

MahJongg Solitaire and Tile Matching for Windows and Mac OS X.

Goodsol Development has published Pretty Good MahJongg 2.41 and Pretty Good MahJongg Mac Edition 2.02, maintenance updates to this award-winning MahJongg game, featuring both original solitaire games and traditional tile matching puzzles, available for both Windows and Mac OS X.

Pretty Good MahJongg contains 300 tile matching layouts, an integrated layout editor, and 55 solitaire and puzzle games, most of which are original and unique, including Pyramid of Wild Dragons, which was designed exclusively for this product by Thomas Warfield.

In Pretty Good MahJongg, you can play 10 different types of solitaire and puzzle games, including MahJongg FreeCell, Crazy Quilt, MahJongg Klondike, MahJongg Spider, and MahJongg Gaps, playing card solitaire games adapted to only 3 suits with 9 ranks, plus extra tiles (such as Dragons).  In Pyramid of Wild Dragons, you build pyramids from a hand of tiles.  In Great Wall, you match tiles to remove them from a grid and then the tiles above fall down to fill in the gaps.  In Pelmanism (Memory), you play a classic game of memorization and recall.  In Four Rivers (Shisen-Sho), you remove proximate pairs of tiles until the tableau is cleared, while in MahJongg Stones, you add single tiles to a zen garden until all of the tiles rest in harmony and balance.

Of course, PGMJ also features standard tile matching, and it ships with 300 layouts, including “Standard” (the most common layout); you can play more than 2 billion deals of each layout, and these deals can be (by default) guaranteed winnable.  However, registered users also get an integrated layout editor that allows them to create and play custom layouts, using up to 4 full MahJongg sets (576 tiles!), alongside the other layouts.  You can share these layouts with your friends or even share them with all other players.  You can download more tile sets (for both solitaire and tile matching games), and with any image editor you can create your own custom tile sets.

You can download a free 30-day trial version for Windows 8/7/Vista/XP or Mac OS X 10.4 or later (Mountain Lion, Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, or Tiger).  For only $24.95, you can buy PGMJ 2.41 for Windows or buy PGMJME 2.02 for Mac, and receive all of the above, including the integrated layout editor.  (That is only 7 cents per game/layout!)

Pretty Good MahJongg just celebrated its 10th birthday in October!  This was the first full game that I (solely) wrote to be published by Goodsol, and it remains the one game that I still play almost daily a decade after its initial (1.0) release.  I also flexed some quasi-artistic muscles and generated three tile sets myself, including two (Simple Tiles and International Marine Signal Flags) which ship with the game, and the other, Playing Card Tiles, which is currently the most popular downloadable tile set.  Active development continues, as version 2.5 with even more games and layouts is scheduled for 2013.