Pretty Good Solitaire ME 3.30

The latest upgrade to our flagship macOS product is available.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.3Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.30, available from Goodsol Development, is the best Solitaire game for Mac computers.  This version of the game can be purchased and immediately downloaded for only $24.95, and it is a free upgrade for customers.

This Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition update adds another 100 games, for a total of 700 games, plus another 90 bonus games not accessible in the trial version (for those who want to try it first).

In addition to the new games, this version 3.30 update addresses several minor requests from customers, fixes all known bugs, and fully supports Apple macOS Sierra.

PSA: Pretty Good MahJongg and macOS Sierra

Public Service Announcement

Pretty Good MahJongg Mac EditionIf you are currently using Pretty Good MahJongg Mac Edition, whether purchased from the Mac App Store or downloaded directly from Goodsol Development, we recommend waiting for the next update before upgrading to macOS Sierra (10.12).

Do Not Upgrade (yet)

Apple is scheduled to release macOS Sierra, the next version (10.12) of their operating system (formerly: Mac OS X) today [September 20, 2016].  As of the final beta version, there is a change (as yet unidentified) that breaks Pretty Good MahJongg Mac Edition.  We are actively working on a solution, and we will publish an update as soon as a fix is available, but in the meantime, we suggest keeping El Capitan (Mac OS X 10.11).

Thank you.

Pretty Good Solitaire ME 3.10

The next version of our Mac Edition is now available.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.1Goodsol Development has released Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.10.  This is a free upgrade for customers who have already purchased, it is available for immediate purchase for only $24.95, and a trial version is also available.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition adds another 25 games, for a total of 575 games, and the full version has 75 bonus games.  The main menu interface was also changed to make the game search/filter box easier to find and use.

The 25 new games in PGSME 3.1 are:

  • Acey and Kingsley
  • Anno Domini
  • Assembly
  • Box Fan
  • Cell 11
  • Crescent Fan
  • Double Aces and Kings
  • Five Stacks
  • Forwards
  • Forwards and Backwards
  • Free Parking
  • Grandmother’s
  • Idle Aces
  • Lucky Thirteen
  • Maze
  • Pyramid Clear
  • Quadruple Russian
  • Racing Aces
  • Red Hand
  • Ripple Fan
  • Solid Square
  • Spaces and Aces
  • Speculation
  • Twin Queens
  • Unusual

Goodsol Community

Along with this release, Goodsol has now created two new places to discuss Solitaire games in social media, to supplement the Goodsol Forum.  The first is the (quite active) Goodsol Solitaire Community on Google+, and the other is the Goodsol Solitaire Group on Facebook.  These are great places to get help with a specific deal number for one of our games, to find a challenging deal number (and maybe help somebody else), to get recommendations for games, or to discuss Solitaire topics in general.

The next version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition will contain 600 games, but you can buy now, have fun right away, and still get that version as a free upgrade!

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.02

We finally finished this extensive technical update.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.0Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 3.0 has now been released by Goodsol Development.  It is available for immediate download/purchase for only $24.95, and a trial version is also available.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition contains 550 games (50 more than the previous version), and the full version provides access to another 75 bonus games.  The interface also contains many user interface improvements.

From a technical perspective, this is a major upgrade, as it represents a complete conversion of the program from Carbon libraries (used since version 1.0) to Cocoa frameworks, an effort imposed by Apple’s diminishing support for the former.  In the process, numerous features were reconsidered and reimplemented, so there are various improvements throughout the program.  One thing that we lost in the process was support for (much) older versions of Mac OS X; the current version requires Snow Leopard (10.6).

What happened to 3.00 and 3.01?

As is often the case with major technical changes, there were a couple of teething problems.  In the first release (3.00), we discovered a race problem with the Cocoa system, where 5-10% of our users had systems that were sending messages to objects that had already been disposed, causing the program to crash when run on these systems.  (Of course, none of the test systems exhibited this problem.)

The second release (3.01), as well as the first, was discovered to have a critical error with menu handling, namely, that card sets could not be switched (properly) using the ‘Preferences->Card Set’ menu.  Unlike the first issue, this one was always reproducible, missed entirely by our testers, and completely my fault.  Oops… 🙂

Once the current version proves stable, we will be adding quite a few (probably 25) more new games and making more interface improvements, including the most requested feature, an ability to sort results and high score tables.  This, of course, will be a free upgrade for all then current PGSME customers, so buy now!

Solitaire

I come by my love of Solitaire honestly.

It is fair to say that I am one of the leading experts in the type of card game known as Solitaire (in the US), or Patience (in the UK and elsewhere).  I have been working with Thomas Warfield at Goodsol Development for more than a dozen years, and in that capacity I have implemented literally hundreds of different Solitaire games on various platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, and iPad.

However, one would be very mistaken to assume that I had to learn about Solitaire back then, or even that these were my first Solitaire software products.  In fact, I have been a Solitaire enthusiast for more than 40 years (easily predating my first access to a computer), and I have been writing programs for playing Solitaire for 30 years.  That is why it was such a good match when Thomas and I started working together; he is also a renown expert, with a very successful Solitaire game, Pretty Good Solitaire, and there is not another company on the planet with more Solitaire expertise from which to draw.

I first learned to play Solitaire from my father when I was about 5 years old.  He taught me a traditional form of Klondike (which many people just call, “Solitaire”), and I clearly remember the first time he watched me deal out the tableau on the stone hearth in front of our fireplace.  I played that a lot over the years, as well as a few other games I picked up.  My neighbor taught me Pyramid, which I really liked, and “Clock” (PGS: Travellers Clock), which had an appeal due to the elegance of play and the physicality of the the cards, but got boring quickly because of the lack of choice.  My mother taught me “Idiot’s Delight” (a name used to describe many different Solitaire games), which in this case was a purely mechanical version of Aces Up.  When I was sick, rather than comic books, I just wanted a couple decks of playing cards and, perhaps, some word search puzzles. 🙂

In the early years of elementary school, I had a couple of friends with whom I had discussions (and disagreements) about the rules of Klondike.  We spent time debating whether one should be able to build Aces to the tableau and, if so, whether Kings could be built on Aces, whether one was allowed to pull cards from the foundations (which I now know is called “winnowing back”), how many cards were dealt from stock to waste, and if there was a limit to redeals.  These are the same kind of game design discussions I still have now as we implement more games.

I also spent a great deal of time working on designing my own solitaire games, the rules of which, alas, were never written down and have been lost forever.  I recall that much of my focus was on small tableau games, those which could be played, ideally, with just one or two piles, making them easier to play in a car.  I also recall at least one with a unique mechanic, based on Go Fish, where the player would declare a selected card, and the play proceeded based on whether (or where?) the nominated rank appeared.  Of course, it is fair to assume that none of my inventions were as compelling as the traditional Solitaire games; otherwise, I probably would still be playing them.

During middle school, an acquaintance (friend of a parent) taught me an unnamed Solitaire game, which had two mechanics I had never seen before: movement of card groups regardless of order (as seen in Yukon) and a “hand” of up to 4 arbitrary cards (like the 4 cells in FreeCell).  This game had a greater degree of calculation and planning, and was less reliant on the luck of the deal, so it was very appealing to me.  Around the same time, I also learned how to do a “bridge” shuffle, so I tried to wear out my hands practicing the two together.  A variant of this game is implemented in PGS as Scorpion Head.

By this time, I was already programming computer games, and the idea of playing Solitaire on a computer was never far away.  My first proper (read: finished 🙂 ) implementation was a text version of Aces Up on my Commodore VIC-20.  The program would shuffle and deal the cards, and one would play with simple keypresses for activating a column (i.e., discarding the top card or moving it into an empty space).  As I recall, my friend and I were the only two who ever actually played this game, but we started wondering about the chances of victory with the implemented rules, so I wrote a computer player that would play a hand using a specific heuristic (n.b., not a comprehensive solution search).  Once debugged, I ran the program overnight and the consistent result was that victory was achieved in just about 5% of the games.  (Clearly, a search would have done better… and taken much longer.)

Many other computer implementations followed.  Our friends showed us a game they called “Canasta Solitaire” (similar to Thirteen Packs, which has nothing in common with Canasta), and at their request, I wrote a version of that for the IBM PC (which, incidentally, became the scene of my biggest computer crash disaster 🙁 ).  I wrote very nice DOS (EGA) versions of Pyramid and other games around 1990, and I was working on the Windows/DirectX versions of the these near the end of that decade, when I also worked (in a non-Solitaire capacity) with MVP Software on some other card game packages.

In 2001 (one suit of years ago), the Goodsol Development years began.  My first project was implementing a comprehensive display library, allowing the original Pretty Good Solitaire [for Windows] more options, including more than 2 decks per game.  The second project was Pretty Good MahJongg, which includes 55 original Solitaire games played with MahJongg tiles, followed by Action Solitaire, including (now) 75 Solitaire games played against the clock, and Most Popular Solitaire, my interpretation on the most popular games in PGS, as well as one (Crazy Quilt) that was the first Goodsol version of that game.  Add Mac and iPad versions of Pretty Good Solitaire and Most Popular Solitaire and a Mac version of Pretty Good MahJongg, as well as other products: Goodsol Solitaire 101 (Windows/Mac/iPad), FreeCell Plus (Windows/Mac/iPad), and A Little Solitaire (iPad).

Counting only Goodsol products (not different SKUs) on each platform (including bonus games), it appears that I have implemented 2639 Solitaire games!  More is definitely yet to come, as Thomas is already up to 840 and counting (with PGS), so I am still trailing by 290 games (on Mac and iPad, as well as an internal Windows project).

Of course, with the implementation of so many games, there is a focus on rules.  Due to my love of Solitaire (and games in general), I began collecting books of Solitaire rules.  The first game I learned from a book and really loved was La Belle Lucie, which I played with the merci (draw) rule, implemented in PGS as Three Shuffles and a Draw.  Since high school, I have amassed around two hundred books of traditional game rules, dozens of which have Solitaire games.  An informal survey of my current bookshelves shows 20 books dedicated solely to Solitaire, dating back as far as 1883 (because my copy of Lady Cadogan’s Illustrated Games of Patience is a reprint of the original 1875 book).

So, while Solitaire may be a simple pastime to most, keep in mind that a few of us really know (and appreciate) these games inside and out.  When you want to buy a computer Solitaire program lovingly crafted by the leading experts in the field…

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.44

Play 440 different Solitaire games on Mac OS X.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac EditionPretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.44, an upgrade to the largest (and growing) collection of solitaire games for Mac systems, has been published by Goodsol Development.

This version of Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition has 20 more new games, for a total of 440 different kinds of solitaire (or 504, if you include the 64 bonus games in the full version).  This version is a free upgrade for all previous PGSME customers.

The 20 new games in version 2.44 include the very latest games added to the Windows version (Candike, Single Spark, and Lancaster), as well as 17 more games of various types.  This upgrade also includes two more card sets in the main bundle: the Traditional Card Set and the Large Suit Card Set.  PGSME 2.44 was featured in Goodsol Newsletter #174; anybody may subscribe to the Goodsol Newsletter (for free) to receive updates, information on featured games, and occasional deals on game software (but don’t tell them I told you 🙂 ).

The new games (in alphabetical order) are:

  • Alexandria
  • Applegate
  • Breakwater
  • Brown Recluse
  • Candike
  • Cleopatra
  • Crossroads
  • Eight On
  • Eighty Thieves
  • Forty Bandits
  • Lancaster
  • Linus
  • Microbe
  • San Juan Hill
  • Scorpion Tail
  • Single Interchange
  • Single Spark
  • Suits in Line
  • Swiss Patience
  • Three Blind Mice

This was actually our quickest significant update yet, as there were fewer “oddballs” than usual.  However, Microbe was the recipient of our Oddball of the Group Award for this upgrade, accounting for 3 extensions to the Goodsol Solitaire Engine (plus two fixes to the rules in the PGS help file).

Our next Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition update (PGSME 2.46) is scheduled for mid-March; as always, it will be a free upgrade to those who buy version 2.44 now.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.42

Solitaire for Mac OS X with 420 different games

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.42This week, Goodsol Development published Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition 2.42, an upgrade to our largest collection of solitaire games for Mac systems.

Pretty Good Solitaire Mac Edition now has 20 new games, bringing the total to 420 kinds of solitaire, plus another 62 bonus variants in the full version.  This version is a free upgrade for all previous PGSME customers.

The interesting thing about the 20 new solitaire games in version 2.42 is that several of these games were selected by customers via the Pretty Good Solitaire page on Facebook, as well as in the Goodsol forum.  That’s right!  We not only take requests for a game, but sometimes even design original solitaire games for particularly active forum participants (e.g., Richard’s Patience).

The new games (in alphabetical order) are:

  • Acme
  • Block Ten
  • Cadran
  • Capricieuse
  • Demon
  • Double Easthaven
  • Double Golf
  • Double Trigon
  • Harp Rush
  • Huge Spider
  • Kingdom
  • Nine by Five
  • Open Doublets
  • Opus
  • Quadruple Trigon
  • Richard’s Patience
  • Right and Left
  • Seven by Four
  • Six by Four
  • Trigon Left

This is our first product release of 2013, finalized on our first business day of the year, but I can assure you that many more are yet to come.

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.

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.

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.