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Solitaire, also known as Patience overseas, is a class of puzzle games played with a standard French 52 card deck. The most popular is Klondike Solitaire because it is bundled with every version of Windows since 3.0. Solitaire may be the most popular videogame ever because besides Windows it is preinstalled or freely available on UNIX and Linux flavors including MacOS and on mobile phones before smart phones existed. Solitaires are easy to implement because they are puzzles and do not require AI.

There are many variations of Solitaire, but all are similar in that you have a deck that has been shuffled put in random order on the tableau, some cards face-up and some face-down. There are rules on how to move cards around to sort them in numerical and suit order. Since you are organizing cards and matching them between numbers, it is akin to jigsaw puzzles in which you match a piece between other pieces to form a picture. Like jigsaw puzzles, most Solitaire games have binary scoring systems, solved (1) or unsolved (0). It is difficult to track your progress and it will take several games before you score.

The late Sid Sackson, a pioneer game designer, was making Eurogames before they were called Eurogames. He created Bowling Solitaire, a modern, intelligent Solitaire. Sackson did what Reiner Kniza does today, creating games with simple mechanics but with complex scoring. Setup requires only two suits, A-10; aces are ones and 10s are zeros. Shuffle the cards and setup the ten bowling pins, an inverted pyramid of face-up cards. The rest of the cards form three stacks of five, three, and two as face-down balls. Following bowling rules, you get ten rounds, starting by revealing the top three stacks of ball cards face-up. If a ball card is played, the next card is revealed face-up. You can knock up to three adjacent pins by adding up the total and if they equal the last digit of your ball card. If you cannot knock any pins, you can discard the top three ball cards and get three new ball cards twice, once per round.

Thunderstone Advance is a refinement of Thunderstone. The basics are the same -- recruit mages, warriors, thieves, and clerics to battle hordes of monsters to recover the Thunderstone. You recruit and equip your heroes by using in-game currency to build a customized deck from a common pool of randomized sets of cards. The player who can craft the best deck in the shortest amount of time can vanquish monsters and recover the Thunderstone.

Set is a match-three puzzle cardgame. Set was inspired by the designer's day job as a population geneticist. Marsha Jean Falco was keeping track of traits in the population of German Shepherds, sort of a simple database on index cards. Since many of the traits were the same, she created symbols for traits. One day as she explained her card system to a veterinarian...inspiration came to her. A few years later, we have Set.

Game play is simple; you lay out twelve cards in a 4x3 grid. Each card has the following features:

• Color: red, green, or purple
• Symbol: ovals, squiggles, or diamonds
• Quantity: one, two, or three symbols
• Shading: solid, open, or striped

Thunderstone is the second most popular deck-building game after Dominion. Many people like one and not the other. If you like elegant Euro-style, streamed-lined game mechanics, you would prefer Dominion. If you enjoy more depth and a stronger American RPG style narrative, Thunderstone is your game.

You can test and refine your strategy with the Campaign mode of the Thunderstone Facebook app or with the upcoming iOS app.

Dixit Odyssey is the European answer to Apples to Apples. Dixit Odyssey is a party game, light enough to play socially even with a drink or two. The game is composed of 84 large, Tarot-sized cards, a scoreboard, player boards, and rabbit score tokens. Each card depicts a childlike, innocent, surreal painting. The beautiful art of the cards make this game magnificent.

The gameplay is simple. At the beginning of a turn, the active player picks a card and describes it with a word or a short phrase. Other players then submit a card from their hand of cards that best matches the active player's description. The active player then shuffles all the submitted cards including her card.

Everyone that guesses the active player's card scores, and players who have their cards (wrongly) picked also score. However if no player guesses correctly, all but the active player score. Thus the goal is to pursue the golden mean of giving clues that are not too easy but not that hard.

Battle Line is a 3-card poker game by Reiner Knizia. Although it is published by a wargame publisher, GMT Games, the theme is shallow and basically a two-player poker variant. It is a short but tense game of risk and hand management.

The game plays like this. Each player starts with a seven-card hand from a 60-card deck composed of six suits, ranging from from 1-10. A battle line is formed by placing six flags. On your turn, you play one card to a flag, face-up, then draw a card from a common draw pile. When three cards are played on a flag, it is be compared against the three card hand on the opposite side of the flag, for capture.

Brawl is a frantic real-time, twitch, card-matching combat game. Like Yomi, each player gets their own unique deck, made of 35 cards. Each deck has a different ratio of Hit and Block cards in three colors (suits). Some characters decks are stronger on offense or defense, stronger in one color, or have more power cards that break-up or change current attacks or modify scoring.

The game is set up by shuffling decks and putting each deck's Base cards on the table. Each player then rapidly flips their deck and chooses to play that card or set aside for future play. The core game play is dominating the base cards with more Hit cards than your opponent. You can achieve this by focusing on offense, adding more Hit cards rapidly to the Base cards, or on defense by hindering opponents attacks with Block cards, preventing Hit cards, or Clear card, removing the Base card and all the Hit cards on it. There are other power cards that change the value of the Base cards, counter Blocks, double hits and more.

Race for the Galaxy AI is a fanware of the Race for the Galaxy cardgame, and expansions designed by Thomas Lehmann. Keldon Jones is an excellent developer, and his artificial intelligence is super strong. The program has been updated numerous times for both UI and AI improvements. If you want to try this woderful card game with all three expansions, The Gathering Storm, Rebel vs Imperium, and The Brink of War, download and play Race for the Galaxy AI.

Yomi is an expandable hand-to-hand combat card game created by David Sirlin for two players. There are ten unique character decks, each with different abilities and stats. Players pick a character deck and duel another player's character deck.  The characters are based on a standard 52-card French (Poker) deck with Street Fighter-like art, and the standard TCG fare of rules text on the cards. The combat system is a triangular rock, paper, scissors type, or Attack > Throw > Block/Dodge > Attack.

Spectromancer is an expandable card game that is published exclusively as a videogame. The expansion cards are sold as fixed sets and there is no collecting, trading, or deck building in Spectromancer. The game was created by Richard Garfield, Alexy Stankevich, and Skaff Elias. Spectromancer is a refined version of Stankevich's Astral Masters.