Solitaire may not be a terribly entertaining game, but it does scratch a certain itch in a calming, addictive way. It's pure escapism, a low-calorie nutritionless fluff for the reptilian parts of the brain to feast upon. Faerie Solitaire takes this base and adds a variety of new hooks to keep you going, such as adorable pets to raise, a village to upgrade with hard-earned fae bucks, and a whole lot of imprisoned faeries for your generic male hero to rescue. On top of that, the pace is strangely merciless; you jump from one stage to the next without getting a chance to spend your new gold and resources on upgrades. To do so requires shamefully quitting mid-hand, and to actually quit the game itself requires a few more steps of legwork and runs you past the Challenge Mode gift shop before letting you out.

The gameplay itself is perhaps a few degrees less brainless than that of actual Solitaire, but it's still a game that mostly plays itself and is almost entirely at the mercy of the way the deck was initially dealt. On the easiest difficulty setting, this doesn't matter; it would take phenomenally bad luck not to meet the meager victory requirements for each stage. On the most difficult, you're more likely to get struck by lightning than to win without grinding endlessly for the consumable items that break the game entirely. Regardless of difficulty, the gameplay is the same, a repetitive series of clicks that gives you just enough of a reward feed to make you feel accomplished. Don't bother with this one; the spell breaks early and if you really need an endlessly addictive time-sink, there are much better perfectly free ones.