A Solitaire Mystery

absolutely one of the best games of 2025. i am obsessed with A Solitaire Mystery. this game made my autism worse for the better. thanks, hempuli! you're a generational talent (likewise, big ups to the other contributors) i have but one complaint: please, please, please fix time travel solitaire. i'll fix it myself if i have to! it's terrible due to its sheer randomness and it's quite difficult due to its underbaked design, which makes it a nightmare for getting a streak toward the achievement (which i want to get for some reason). i would frankly consider it near-unwinnable without undos, which makes it a bad solitaire. nine times out of ten, the card you get is completely useless. so often, there's only a single card in the pool of available cards that can save me from losing, but i have to click a time machine and hit undo upwards of 200 times to get the one card i need to survive. not only that, but the turn clocks for these cards being (somewhat) random is bad design that encourages bad play, considering you can spam the slots and hit undo to try for a more ideal turn clock. these elements of abundant midgame randomness shouldn't exist. my idea: simply add the ability to ASK your future self for a specific card in the availability pool! by incorporating a menu that appears when you click a time travel machine and letting the player decide which available card they want and at what available time they'll be able to send it back, you now have actual strategy rather than a huge reliance on luck! this doesn't actually affect the game balance considering you can already undo and redo a time machine as many times as you want in order to get the one card you need to survive, so why not eliminate the frustrating and unhelpful randomness? i only suggest this because time travel solitaire stands out as the one game in the collection i would call "bad," and it doesn't have to be. the 29 other solitaires are all at least some amount of interesting fun, and some of them are absolutely brilliant. hats off (also... if you're going to tell us if each game is playable with a standard deck... tell us how to deal out the cards with a standard deck if there's hidden dealing algorithms! i had been playing eldritch invasion with a real deck and wondering why it wasn't as fun until i noticed there is a particular dealing logic. for anyone who would like to play it with real cards, how i replicated it was: shuffle the cards and divide them into two decks, A-9 (non-monsters) and 10-13 (monsters). take the first monster card from the monster deck and set it aside. then, deal an amount of non-monster cards equal to the rank of that monster card minus 7 (e.g.: you set aside a jack. 11-7, so deal 4 non-monster cards). deal into four columns, from left to right. leave room for an empty fifth column. after you deal to the fourth column, return to the first column. repeat the following step until no monster cards remain in the monster deck: deal 1 monster card, then two non-monster cards. once no monsters remain in the monster deck, deal the remaining non-monsters. finally, deal the monster card you set aside)