Much of the effort in playing many solitaire games is taken up by having to scan the layout for possible moves. The Solitaire Games of Skill (SGOS) collection highlights any cards that can be moved and any key cards throughout the entire layout. Thus nearly every possible move is indicated. Normally when playing Spider the player has to scan the layout after each deal in order to see if any suits are complete and thus can possibly be removed. But the SGOS Spider game signals the player using a table whenever a suit has all 13 cards. The same table keeps track of the suit and ranks of all the facedown cards or cards not yet dealt. This is much easier than trying to keep track of cards using spreadsheet software as some players do. When evey possible move is indicated by SGOS the player can strategize better and play the game more skillfully. More details on how cards are highlighted and how you can play more skillfully are available on the Skillful Play webpage.

Solitaire Games of Skill (SGOS) has the best card mechanics of any solitaire software. Cards in a single column highlighted as described above can be each sent to its own destination by a single mouse click on the column. You can move cards by clicking on the place where you want them to go rather than having to move the mouse to the card and click on the card. Cards can be dealt from the hand by clicking anywhere on the layout. Building with cards when cards can only be moved one at a time can be very tedious. This is true for games like Spider, Baker's Dozen, Fortress, Flower Garden, Streets and Alleys, and FreeCell. Most solitaire software allows the player to make supermoves when playing FreeCell but not when playing most other games involving moving cards singly. A supermove is a move that allows the player to move more than one card at a time based on the number of tableau spaces or vacant cells. SGOS goes beyond supermoves by allowing you to move cards to a column while taking into account intermediate builds on other columns as well as the number of tableau spaces and cells. And SGOS extends this augmented supermove to all games including Spider where tableau building involves moving cards one at a time. In some games like Spider and the game Streets and Alleys it is advantageous to get sequences of cards of the same suit together. Getting a single column right can require dozens of mouse clicks. With a single mouse click SGOS allows the player to swap columns in order to obtain sequences of the same suit.

Cards are sent automatically to the foundations without impairing any tableau building. At the end of a game when the game is obviously won, the player does not have to continue to make perfunctory moves to finish the game. The game is finished for the player automatically. Games can be played with up to 80% less mouse movement and mouse clicks. More details on how you can play with less effort are available on the Less Effort webpage.

For games like Russian Solitaire, Pyramid, Scorpion, Cruel, Streets and Alleys, Fortress, and Flower Garden, the player can scan the layout for several minutes before discovering the game is unwinnable. Sometimes the player only discovers a game was never winnable after 10 or 20 minutes of moving cards. SGOS throws out unwinnable games for 48 solitaire games including the aforementioned games as described on the Filter webpage.

Almost half the 424 games of Solitaire Games of Skill are new games not to be found elsewhere. For the player who loves the game Pyramid there are 7 games to which a pyramid has been added including Canfield, Putt Putt, and Buffalo Bill. There are 16 Pyramid games in all. For the FreeCell devotee there are 21 games to which 1 or more cells have been added including Klondike, Aces Up, Gaps, Nestor, and La Belle Lucie. For players who like to choose their base foundation rank as in the game Queen of Italy, there are 17 such games including versions of Klondike, Canfield, Forty Thieves, and Agnes Bernauer. There is even an 8 suit version of Aces Up. More details on new games can be found on the New Games webpage.

To experience the above features, click on the left box below for a free Demo of the Solitaire Games of Skill Collection. The Demo differs from the regular version of Solitaire Games of Skill in that it has only 30 ways to shuffle a deck of cards while the regular version has over four billion different shuffles. However the Demo shuffles are from 601 to 630 using the Microsoft FreeCell game number system and therefore include the notorious FreeCell game number 617 (see Mike Keller's website). Also after 30 days the Demo quits working.

You might also want to try Solitaire Games of Skill Sampler. Solitaire Games of Skill Sampler consists of the twenty solitaire games and is taken from the 424 games of the Solitaire Games of Skill collection. Each game of Solitaire Games of Skill Sampler comes from a different major type of solitaire and is an original game not found elsewhere. Solitaire Games of Skill Sampler has as many shuffles as the Solitaire Games of Skill Collection and does not expire in 30 days like the Demo. More details on Solitaire Games of Skill Sampler are available on the Freebie page of this website. If after playing the Demo and/or Sampler you find you want to purchase the product, click on the right box below. If your operating system is Windows XP Home Edition or a version of Windows that is earlier than XP, these products require .Net Framework 1.1 which can be downloaded using the following link: Download .Net Framework 1.1