Solitaire Royale was the first game I remember playing on my first IBM PC (remember when we all thought those were the coolest computers EVER??!!) During my time as a software developer in the mid-1980's, we sat around (monochrome!) 15" CRTs and played all of the different games in Solitaire Royale - including "Aunt Anne's Tour", which required that you have some working knowledge of eight different solitaire games in order to succeed. Games like Pyramid, Klondike and Canfield were familiar enough, but some of the other games - like my personal favorite, "Three Shuffles and a Draw" - have never been duplicated or successfully imitated.
Spectrum Holobyte - the original company that produced Solitaire Royale - must have been a fun company to work for back in the day. In the original user manual for Solitaire Royale (which I still have!), some of the "loading instructions" say things like "If you have a mouse, connect it to your computer" and "Boot the computer with DOS". Ah, maybe those really were the days after all...
In Solitaire Royale, Pyramid is a serviceable version of the classic "13" game - where you remove cards from a pyramid-shaped tableau (another word Spectrum Holobyte loved to use!) in pairs totaling 13 (a 6 and a 7, a 9 and a 4, etc.). Jacks count 11 and Queens count 12, so they are paired with deuces
and aces. Kings, worth 13, are removed alone.
Golf is another frustrating game (in real life and in Solitaire Royale). You get 35 cards on the board, and you have to remove them from the board in either ascending or descending order - depending on which way you want to go. It's frustrating, in that there is only one foundation pile, and the game is easily won or lost from the very beginning, but that's why it deserves the name "Golf" - and, probably, because all of the other 4-letter words were taken...
No need to say much about Klondike; it's probably the best-known solitaire game out there and the version in Solitaire Royale is good.
I spent many hours playing Canfield, but much less time with Corners, Concentration and Reno. Those games are also very frustrating, and require more patience than I often had.
Three Shuffles and a Draw, by far the best game in Solitaire Royale (at least in my opinion), is more than worth the "price of admission". All of the cards in the deck are visible from the get-go, but that doesn't mean the game is always easy to win. It's so much fun, though, that you find hours passing by without even recognizing the primitive and cheesy graphics and 20-year-old-video-technology built into the games' GUI.
Two thumbs up, definitely, for Solitaire Royale...and try "Three Shuffles and a Draw" - you'll find yourself negotiating for a Fourth Shuffle before you know it!!
