A Game of Solitaire To Get Us Through The Pandemic

This pandemic forced many people to stay put inside their homes. Work-From-Home, remote or distanced learning and virtual meetings which were basically something like an “option” two or three years ago have become the new norm.

Now, play, on the other hand, is like a couple of decades ahead of its time. We have long moved from parks and arcades to the comforts of our own homes since the late-1980s with the development of TV and computer games. Heck, we even spent a lot of hours playing solitaire and minesweeper on our windows PC back in the 90s just as a past time. So I guess that helped trained the GenXers a bit to adapt to our never ending lockdowns here in Manila. The millennials, I am not so sure. 🙂

And speaking of solitaire, I recently came across this free play gaming website called solitaire.org with a bunch of old school classic PC games basically listing different solitaire and card games.

Now why would I come looking for a solitaire game on the internet? Well, aside from the fact that I’ve always liked card games, playing solitaire and other similar type of games actually has a lot of benefits, especially during this pandemic. Here’s a couple that I know of:

It soothes and calms the mind
It helps improve one’s memory and mental skills
It’s the perfect alone time entertainment – solitaire? duh
It promotes a positive sense of competitiveness, basically you are in competition with your self so that’s even harder

Lastly, and I would really like to emphasize on this one. This game teaches you some basic facts about life. For example, you might not have any control with the cards that you’ll get with each game but that doesn’t matter – it’s how you play the cards that you’ve been dealt with that makes all the difference. The same with life and this freaking pandemic. We have absolutely no control over this, we don’t even fully understand why it’s spreading or how to stop this, or if we’ll be able to get back to the life we once knew 2 years ago. All we have control with is our attitude towards this and what we’re going to do right now. Whether we win or lose, that will all depend on how well you play the cards that are on your hands right now.

But enough of that psycho mumbo jumbo, overall it’s a free fun game that keeps you occupied. 🙂

Now what I learned new on the solitaire.org site is that there are actually a lot of solitaire games. They’ve listed it down into 5 core games:

Klondike or classic solitaire
Freecell
Spider
Pyramid
Tripeaks

They’ve also added a new variation called Golf. And under these core games are dozens of solitaire card game variations – a very long list of games to keep you busy during this pandemic even if it takes us a decade to get out of – which we pray won’t happen of course.

Now aside from solitaire games, they also have an extensive list of other card games like Casino BlackJack and Vegas Poker; and other types of classic online games like Mahjong, Hidden Object Games, Puzzle Games, Matching Games, and other Arcade Games.

Here are some of the other games that I’ve tried:

Basically, all these games are solitaire or solitary games. Much a lot like this pandemic – we’re all playing against ourselves. No teams, no fancy equipment, weapons or enhancements needed. It’s just you and your wit. And guess what, YOU CAN WIN THIS!