23 Jun, 2023
Crapette multiplayer solitaire
Crapette is a competitive 4-player card game that plays like Solitaire, except we aim to get rid of all our cards before the opponents do the same.The game uses a 78-card Tarot deck that is evenly split between all four players, and 5 cards are placed at the top of the board. On each turn, we draw a card from our deck and place it either into one of the stacks at the top following standard Solitaire rules, or into the stacks on the right side that must start with the lowest card in the suit.
If we can’t place the card anywhere, we throw it into our own discard pile. Once we run out of cards to draw, these discarded cards shuffle to form a new deck.
And this is where the game becomes interesting, as we are sometimes able to move cards to the discard piles of other players, thus increasing the number of cards they must get rid of. So, the strategy is to keep the opponents' decks full of cards, while gradually transferring our own cards somewhere else.
If a player places their card incorrectly or discards it when there was a legal move to make, the next player must call “Crapette” or they’ll be penalized along with the initial player. So we should pay attention not only to our own moves but also the moves of all our opponents.
While I deeply enjoyed the game's complexity and strangely addictive nature, I felt the matches were strongly affected by random factors. Making the right decisions requires a lot of strategic thinking, but no matter how hard we try, the odds are sometimes just stacked against us.
The matches can be played online or via private rooms, and if no players are around, they fill with bots.
Crapette monetizes via forced ads between games, and incentivized ads for tips and coins used to buy cosmetic skins. A $2.99 iAP removes the ads for 6 months.
Overall, this is a nice competitive experience for all fans of intellectual card games.
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