This is
Thord Daniel Hedengren

The gaming world, solitaire style

What is it with solitaires? I would never take out a deck of cards and lay out a game of Solitaire (you know, the traditional kind) nor would a open up the (purely fictional, unfortunately) box of Mah-Jong bricks to do a solitaire set-up there either.

No way would I play Memory with myself.

And then a game comes along for the Nintendo DS or PSP. Err, scratch that – the PSP’s lacking still. Poor Sony…

Anyway, a game comes along with a few of these solitaire games as extras. What did I get the most out of in Super Mario 64 DS? Well, I visited Luigi’s Casino of course, forgetting about the 3D platformer that reinvented a whole genre.

My latest poison is 42 All-Time Classics for the DS, known as Clubhouse Games in the States. Classic card and board games has never been as addicted, and this surely rivals Tetris DS for my online gaming time via wifi. Chess is a marvelous game and setting it up anytime I like, with live opponents, is something I truly enjoy. Sure, it hasn’t got that classic feel to it that my marble board and pieces from Morocco delivers whenever I touch it, but it’s hard to find chess players these days and even harder to get them to play me.

And when night crawls in and I feel like doing something to empty my mind before going to sleep, I lay out a digital solitaire game of Mah-Jong or traditional Solitaire with cards. I do it over and over again, in almost meditative fashion, and I wonder why I never bought those ivory bricks in Stockholm in 1997.

The whole world is a press of a button away these days, even for gamers. Graphics are stunning and I have a crisp HDTV to play around with.

And here I am, playing the classics by myself. Again and again.