When developers actually think about those playing the game

Cardmania Pyramid Solitaire – the way to make a good game great Solitaire has been a staple food for most casual gamers for a number of decades. From time to time developers try to rework these classics with mixed success. It is usually just a splash of colour or a bit of sound to try and flog a dead horse back to life, but this is not the case with Cardmania pyramid solitaire.

The essence of the game is the same in that you play a game of pyramid solitaire with the goal of clearing all of the cards in the middle. To clear the cards you need to do some simple maths and the cards are removed. If you look closer however you would see that they didn’t change this, they just made it much friendlier to the player.

So often apps and games are developed with a lot of assumptions in mind, mostly because developers understand a game they then think everyone else would as well. Here they went through the parts of the game step by step and looked at how they can make every step a little easier to understand and a little bit more intuitive, while still ensuring the game remained a challenge.

I don’t want to tell you how the game is played, but just how these guys so successfully took an ordinary game from good to great.

When you start playing the rules are laid out As mentioned earlier, it is not the most difficult of games, but very easy to get tangled up a bit if you don’t understand the rules. When you fire up cardmania pyramid solitaire for the first time, you can select to look at the instructions and they are laid out as shown below.

I agree, there is nothing strange or amazing about this part. It does however explain to you all you need to know about the maths involved in pyramid solitaire in no uncertain terms. The reasons for putting this up here is that the similarity between cardmania solitaire and the other versions just about end here.

It is nicely laid out. Gives you all the information you need, but then doesn’t just leave you there.

The first obvious differences of cardmania pyramid solitaire What you fill find with most variations of pyramid solitaire is that the backgrounds may change, the cards may look a little different and the scoring might be a little different.

With this version you have so many different levels to contend with. 30 of them to be exact.

On each level you then get the option to play at different difficult levels ranging from easy, to normal, to hard. This is something you will often find in other variations of the game as well, but not explained as well. As you mouse over the three different options you will see how each of them changes and becomes more difficult.

When playing at the harder levels you get the reward of bigger score multipliers, which can really help boost your score.

In a single session you play online your scores are also saved, so if you need to step away for a bit, you would need to start right at the beginning again. You can just continue on the level you were at.

They layout of cardmania pyramid solitaire is however the first real change to the game. It is laid out different from the pyramid that everyone has grown so used to over the years. The very first screen on “Level 1� looks like this:

Now let’s just pause here and look at the layout of the screen. Usually when you have a game like pyramid solitaire you would get the instructions up front. It is often not that difficult to figure it out from there, but they have found a way to add help text to every part of the screen. None of it is intrusive or stops you from enjoying the game, it is just there!

So this makes it extremely easy to understand the instructions and to know where to next when you play the game. Although these features are already enough to make things a lot easier, the one that really stands out is the little maths helper The Cardmania Pyramid Solitaire Maths Helper I have to admit, I don’t know if that is its real name, but it made sense to me. When you play a game of pyramid solitaire the goal is relatively easy: remove all of the cards from the centre stack by combining them in pairs totalling 13 (with the exception of the King which you can remove on its own) before the time runs out.

That rule doesn’t change here. Something I have found however is that at first it takes you a bit of time to get used to doing this small maths problem, but you quickly get used to it. However after playing the game a few times, your brain starts to go out of sync or something and you get snagged on the easiest of cards.

You need to remove the cards as quickly as possible however in order for you to get your hands on the bonus. This comes around if you remove a few sets of cards in quick succession (I even got one ).

This is where our friend the cardmania pyramid solitaire maths helper comes in. When you select any card it will bring up the following:

The example above is a screenshot I took after selecting the Ace, however if you just select the Queen it would have read: “12 + __ 13. If you choose the wrong one it just discards your choice and you continue selecting new sets of cards. You have no idea how much this helps and to the level of actually getting you these:

Yep. That is the famous bonus I was talking about!

There are many sites that host the game and honestly they don’t differ much. You can however play it here if you like.

There are a couple of variations of the game on there, but I honestly need to say that the others don’t come close. Even though they are also fun, you are sure to return to cardmania solitaire every time.