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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.

Modart is a fanware implementation of Modern Art, one of the best Reiner Knizia's auction games. Each player is an art broker and speculator, buying paintings low to sell high. It has been published in multiple languages, in different editions. Unfortunately the US, Mayfair edition is the ugliest of them of all. The Brazilian, Nordic, and German editions are all unique and beautiful. However, the most intriguing is the Japanese edition, with stamps rather than paintings.

Zendo is an inductive reasoning game by Kory Heath. Heath reworked Eluesis, a game designed to play with a standard 52-card deck by Robert Abott. Eluesis was first published in Scientific American, June 1959, but has been published several times since in card game rulebooks. Heath created a complete boxed set with colorful transparent pyramids, guessing tokens, sample puzzles, rules and a new Buddhist theme rather than the original Judeo-Christian theme. Zendo is more colorful and tactile because it uses 3D pyramids rather than standard cards.

Carcassonne is a popular casual Eurogame that many gamers use to introduce modern designer games. Carcassonne's strength is the simple yet engaging rules. On your turn you draw one and play one tile, optionally you can place your "meeple," a follower token for scoring. The decisions are simple since one edge of the tile must match the edge of a previously played tile to create a consistent landscape. However some gamers prefer something more meaty and can add any of a number of expansions to add more depth. Expansions range from intriguing to ridiculous such as the, Carcassonne: Catapult -- you fling tokens with a chopstick sized, wooden catapult. However adding expansion breaks the core simplicity by adding more fiddliness.

Caracassone: The Castle is a reworking, a sequel to the original Carcassonne by Reiner Knizia and with Klaus-Jürgen Wrede, the original Carcassonne designer. Although the core gameplay remains the same -- draw-one, play-one -- Caracassone: The Castle is a much deeper game. The theme is also the same, you run a medieval temp agency, sending workers to short-term contract jobs. Key differences are: no edge matching, two-player only, static boundaries, and complex scoring. The game is set up by building outer walls that create an outline of the the castle. The walls do three things: create a defined tableau, offer seven start spaces that tiles can be placed next to, and serve as a scoring track numbered 0-99.

Goko is an ambitious online boardgame portal. As of now they have three games: Dominion, Forbidden City, and All the King's Men. All the King's Men is a hybrid tile-pushing RTS by Goko -- an original game. The other two are boardgames. Each game has an AI and a tutorial; Thus Goko offers play with with people or the AI. Forbidden City is an light edge-matching tile game that is published exclusively as a digital edition -- there is no retail cardboard edition. More importantly, Goko's implementation of Donald X. Vaccarino's Dominion, is the best digital implementation to date.

All the games are free and playable without registration. Since the games are implemented in HTML5, they run on numerous platforms. I wish Goko the best, because their "coming soon" is highly impressive, if they can keep up the same level of polish for their future boardgames.

Slapshot is a highly abstracted hockey simulation card game with a great amount of luck. The original edition was created in 1982 but reprinted multiple times, including a recent reprint and an iOS app. The publisher, Columbia Games is famous for making one thing -- block war boardgames. Slapshot is an odd game in long lineup of hard-core wargames from Columbia Games.

Slapshot's core gameplay is similar to Reiner Knizia's Battleline, because both games use lane-based "combat". Each player gets six cards that represent six players (suits): three forwards, two defensemen, and one goalie. On your turn you can draft, trade, or play (challenge) a team. Drafting improves your hand by exchanging one of your low cards with a draw from a common pool of face-down cards. Trading is similar to drafting but you randomly draw a card from another player's hand and you must exchange a card of the matching suit. Thus if you draw a forward card from an another player, you must give one of your forwards in exchange.

Keltis Or is a dice version of the popular Lost Cities card game. When Knizia submitted the Lost Cities Board Game, a follow-up to the original Lost Cities, Kosmos, the German publisher, decided to retheme it from an archeological expedition to leprechauns and clover harvesting. The American publisher kept Knizia's original design and name, Lost Cities: The Board Game, while in Europe the game is distributed as Keltis. Keltis is popular, and spawned six sequels and variations.

Keltis Or plays much like Lost Cities--collect and play sets of sequentially numbered tokens. However Keltis Or uses three six-sided dice, with pips 1-5 and a Wishing Stone icon. You get two rolls and you choose which gets locked or rerolled. You can pick up one of the five suited chips, numbered from 0-10, that match a single pip value, or sum of pips that you rolled each turn. You can acquire a zero chip by rolling a Wishing Stone. On the numbered chips are randomly distributed long- and short-term score modifier tokens. Since there is a sunk cost when starting a new suit, one must balance long- and short-term goals as well being careful not to take on too many suits.

The aMAZEing Labyrinth, or simply Labyrinth, in the original German game, is a children's sliding-puzzle boardgame. Players, in turn, race to get their avatar pawns to randomized assigned objects in a labyrinth. When a player picks up all the items, she heads for her starting spot to claim victory. The twist is that the labyrinth keeps changing as each player also shifts the labyrinth by playing labyrinth tiles. Tiles are are arranged in a 7 by 7 grid. The players can slide a new labyrinth tile in one of twelve edged spots, pushing an entire row or column of the maze.

Ascension: Storm of The Souls (ASOTS) is a deck-building game, akin to Thunderstone and Dominion. Players build a custom deck with in-game currencies like the aforementioned games, but ASOTS is simpler, and looks and feels more like the original source of inspiration, Magic: The Gathering. Another major difference is that ASOTS has more randomness in deck-building.

In both Dominion and Thunderstone, the card market is randomized in fixed sets, allowing players to see all the cards available for deck-building. In ASOTS, only six cards are available for purchase and the rest are revealed as cards are bought. Thus, one cannot fully plan card mix strategies, rather one must acquire cards tactically, carefully watching the card purchases of other players.

Tales of the Arabian Nights (TOTAN) is a hybrid electronic and mechanical pinball game. Bookkeeping, combo chain states, and scoring is managed by the electronic components while gameplay -- keeping the steel ball in play -- is managed by sloped angles, gravity and mechanical parts. TOTAN is ranked number seven of all pinball machines in The Internet Pinball Database. TOTAN gets interesting if you understand the goal and the various "side quests," and the subtle meaningful choices that designer John Popadiuk put in TOTAN. There are many ways to achieve your goal of rescuing the princess from the evil genie Saleem Bagazi. However because there is no tutorial for TOTAN (or most pinball machines), players cannot fully appreciate the intricate and clever game design. Even after reading the official manual (PDF), it is difficult to understand all the different scoring and combo options. Many players, unaware of specific goals, will play TOTAN by hitting random bumpers and other targets, and watch the pretty lights, unaware of the deeper gameplay.