Solitaire is the universal cubicle worker's timewaster. So what do you get if you add two billion shuffle counts, seventy game types, in-game statistics, timers, scores, multiple save features and customizable chimes and graphics? King Sol. Rapture's unbelievable extension of the original office timewaster is so complete and so thorough, you'll want to find a way to delete or uninstall the solitaire icon in your games folder and replace it with King Sol.

With card games, I liken it to the chess genre where every subsequent release is an evolutionary step. It might be a new graphics engine. It might be a new artistic motif or the addition of some new technical novelty. But the additions are always incremental and the final product, a car with a new shine and a few more features. It seems like King Sol has taken fifty steps with its hefty amount of material. It contains a total of seventy solitaire variants that work on the basic precepts of the card game. Before you start each game, there are concise instructions to get you started on how each variants scores and tips on how to play it. You also get a table to show you what your odds are, how many decks are involved, what basic game type it is and other details that you can absorb at a glance. King Sol even lets you organize your favorite game types, play recently chosen variants or a random one from the list.

Another smart feature introduced by Rapture to cater the game to you is the ability to keep track of statistics and scores throughout the entire game itself. You get graphical analysis of your winning ratio in all sessions and in the current session as well as additional numbered statistics. You can also set game timers and view extensive lists of high scores. The game even lets you sort the tables to view them in meaningful ways. With two billion shuffle counts multiplied by seventy game variants, that's enough gameplay to outlast the natural lifetime of your Pocket PC device.

If that's not enough customization, King Sol also lets you customize backgrounds, deck insignia and sound schemes. That's a lot of ways to keep the game of solitaire looking fresh. In fact, the Rapture website lets you download more schemes and guides you through the process of creating your own should you be unhappy with the ones available.

With handy features like unlimited redo/undo, auto-playing of your cards, there are lots of amenities in King Sol. Coupled with the fact that you have manual loading/saving, auto-save and a bookmark mode, you can leave King Sol any time and come back to your game without any hassle; something the developers obviously took from Palm based games. At $19.95 USD, King Sol offers a comprehensive and unbeatable feature set for the game of solitaire. It's hard to see how the developers will be able to one-up themselves with the next release of King Sol. Maybe they'll have to crown it Emperor Sol but they obviously have this market cornered for the Pocket PC as no other title I've come across offers the flexibility this one has. The title itself is tiny, weighing in at a few hundred kilobytes and easily swims its way into the busy mobile user's handheld.

If you spend any inkling of time with the card game, you're not going to be disappointed with this buy. And for cubicle workers, if your network administrator or IS chap has deleted solitaire from all 'work' computers, now you can play some quality solitaire with King Sol on your PDA. Time will be wasted discretely and life, all of a sudden, is good again.

Ratings:
[07/10] Addictiveness
[18/20] Gameplay
[13/15] Graphics
[10/10] Interface/controls
[09/10] Program Size
[03/05] Sound
[05/05] Discreetness
[14/15] Learning Curve
[ N/A ] Multiplayer