Common Loon Solitaire

Common Loon Solitaire is the card game Klondike, otherwise known as Patience. It is written in Free Pascal with the Lazarus IDE. The current version is February 22, 2021.

Features

You can move the cards the traditional way by dragging them to where you want them to go.
You can also move them by a simple click. This makes for a very speedy game. The program knows where you want the card to go. But if it should end up in the wrong place, another click will move it to your intended spot.
If there are several cards to be raised to the score piles, you can send them all at once with a turn of your mousewheel. This is especially helpful to quickly complete a game you are clearly winning.
You can control the speed of play with a slider button on the top panel. To have things happen immediately without animation, just move the slider all the way to the right.
You can undo any number of moves, and of course can restart a game to try a different strategy.
Situational hinting is provided (normal and desperate).
You can set the program to play continuous games of solitaire automatically.
No language dependency - the gameplay proceeds without text of any kind (but English is used in the information window).
Easy installation/removal, does not scatter files across your computer.

There are not many options in the game. There is only one card deck; one card is drawn each click; and you may run through the deck any number of times.

Installation - Linux

Common Loon Solitaire comes distributed as a single executable file. It can be found here. Simply download that file to your computer and place it wherever you wish. Go to that directory, and check the md5sum:

614d2fbaaeb42f2a857eb4ad3cbb7831

Make it executable with:

chmod 755 commonloonsolitaire

Now you can start it from the command line in that directory by typing in a terminal:

./commonloonsolitaire

Or you can integrate it into your Linux menu system. An icon is provided, but the setup is up to you. The program should work on just about any Linux distribution with the X Window system.

Installation - Windows

The latest Windows executable can be found here. It should work for Windows Vista, 7, 8, 10, and maybe even earlier versions of Windows. Just download it and place wherever you want on your Windows PC. The md5sum is:

77cdc72fc6f45c51b1cb62c16212680d

Create a shortcut if you like. You can use the provided icon.

Removing the app

Should you no longer want the program, simply remove that single file. The program does not create any additional files. All the resources it needs (icons, pictures, etc.) are contained within the executable, and they remain there. There are no settings or preferences or hidden files utilized.

Licence

Common Loon Solitaire is free software, distributed under the GNU Public Licence, version 2. Source can be found at GitHub.

Other games

You may also be interested in Common Loon Hearts, a fun card game that requires pitting your wits against some challenging animal opponents.

Last revised: 2021.02.22 Send me a comment home