Legends of Solitaire: Curse of the Dragons

My soft spot for tiny studios doing earnest work is well-documented, and The Revills Games, a husband-and-wife team out of Adelaide, South Australia, is exactly the kind of operation I find myself rooting for. Curse of the Dragons is their fantasy skin on the TriPeaks solitaire formula, and it works better than you might expect from a genre premise that sounds like a board-game parody.

The core loop is straightforward: clear cards from uniquely shaped boards by chaining cards one rank higher or lower than your discard pile, regardless of suit. Combo chains earn gold, gold funds a blacksmith shop stocked with potions, keys, and weapon cards, and those tools let you break through board obstacles including vines, ice, rocks, locked cards, and dragon-fire tiles. The obstacle variety is the mechanical highlight. On Casual difficulty your weapons survive indefinitely and King-to-Ace wrapping is allowed, making the experience genuinely relaxed. Crank it to Normal or Hard and weapons degrade, special cards thin out, and the shop becomes a resource you actually have to budget. The forty-chapter adventure breaks into roughly 400 individual hands total, so there is real volume here.

The story wraps the solitaire in a light Lord-of-the-Rings-flavored quest, narrated chapter by chapter via journal entries read aloud before each set of ten hands. You recruit four companions across the journey who charge up and fire off abilities, giving each run a small tactical layer. The fantasy-themed card faces, varied background art spanning the four corners of the kingdom, and a soundtrack that multiple reviewers independently described as calming and slightly melancholic all contribute to a mood that is genuinely its own thing. It is not ambient noise, but it pulls in that direction, and I mean that as a compliment.