The Solitaire Conspiracy is a beefed-up version of Streets and Alleys solitaire where face cards have special abilities depending on their suits, some good and some bad, that can trigger during gameplay. It boasts outstanding production values for a game of its kind, having been developed in a modern game engine, which allows it to present fancy graphics and VFX together with FMV cutscenes that put you in the role of a spy working to overthrow the most powerful man in the world.

It's fun while the novelty lasts, which is not very long and much less than the game's length. There's three main ways to play the game: one with a time limit, one with a move limit, and one with neither. The game really wants you to play the former two, and both work to an extent, but the thing about solitaire is that not only is it too luck-heavy to be treated as skill-based, it's also a casual game to be played once in a while, to burn five idle minutes, and the way TSC requires you to be confortable with each suit and its associated abilities runs counter to that. Picking it up again after a few months away, having to relearn everything, is painful.

And the story? Good grief. The FMV cutscenes are cringy, but even giving the game the benefit of the doubt by assuming that was intentional, the overall writing is still dull and repetitive. It didn't take me long to just start skipping every blurb of text, just clicking random missions and trying to finish the game faster. For a game so short, it manages to stretch its plot thin.

Despite all that, The Solitaire Conspiracy still makes for a fun couple of hours, again, while the novelty lasts. After that, though, I'm not really sure who this game is for.