Free Brain Games for Seniors

Classic Solitaire has always had a quiet unfairness to it: some deals are lost before you touch a card, because the shuffle happens to bury the cards you would need — and there is no way to see that from the outside, so you sit there trying, and it keeps not working, and it was never you. From today, the game checks every new deal before handing it over: it plays the deal through to the end behind the scenes, and if it cannot be won it shuffles again and checks the new one, until it has a deal with a genuine way home. You will not notice anything except perhaps a blink while it shuffles. Hard deals are still hard — the game will not steer you, and a wrong turn can still get you stuck (that is what Undo is for). But the cards themselves are never against you any more.

There is a moment in Solitaire when the game is already won — every card is turned over, nothing can go wrong — and all that is left is moving thirty-odd cards to the four piles at the top, one tap at a time. That is not a puzzle any more, it is just work for your wrist. A "Finish game" button now appears at that moment and sends the rest home for you, card by card so you can watch it happen. It only appears when we have checked that the finish really does work from where you are, so if you can see the button, the game is yours.

In Mahjong Solitaire you can sometimes clear a run of tiles and then find that nothing left on the board matches anything else — through no fault of your own, since which pair you take first decides what you can reach later. Until now that was the end of the game. When it happens you will now see a "Shuffle the rest" button: it keeps every tile you still have and lays them out again in an order that can be finished. Nothing is added and nothing is taken away — the count of tiles left stays exactly the same, they simply move. Very occasionally the last two tiles end up stacked one directly on the other, which no rearranging can help; the game will say so plainly rather than leave you pressing a button that cannot work.