![]() Maybe there’s a moral to be derived from this. The things you earn for yourself are infinitely more interesting than the things which you can flaunt to all the other players. It’s a solo game by nature, isn’t it? It falls under the same category as the achievements versus the medals. I mean, I’ve never been a competitive sort of person, but I just don’t see why I should be comparing myself to other solitaire players. Now, honestly, the Daily Challenges are less interesting to me, because it doesn’t feel like the unlockable stuff is as substantial as the Star Club stuff. Clear enough challenges in a month, and you’ll earn a badge. Cleared challenges give you coins, and your coin total is tallied up at the end of every month and placed in a worldwide leader board. Similarly, the Daily Challenges give you the same sorts of challenges, but only five a day, usually one from each of the five available games. Winning challenges awards you stars, which are used to unlock new packs of challenges, sometimes with different themes. Challenges tend to be things like “Play all four Aces to the foundations,” “Solve the board,” “Score at least 50000 points,” “Play the 9 of Spades to the foundation in less than 150 moves,” or “Clear 2 boards in 3 deals.” Sometimes a timer gets involved, and other times, you are given a game already in progress to work from. Star Club is a curated series of challenges that present you with pre-determined deals and task you with doing specific things. This round of TriPeaks is only considered “won” if I’ve reached a certain point goal before the game ends. What about those Star Club and Daily Challenge things, though? Well, let’s have a look at those. I can understand there being rewards for things like winning a certain number of challenges, or for breaking speed records, but it baffles me that things like flipping one card or saving a theme (things that require no effort) are worth points on the public profile, and yet it’s the medals – the ones that aren’t shared to the public and aren’t worth Gamer Score – are the ones that require a lot of skill and aren’t even tracked by Achievements. ![]() Win a game of FreeCell having never had more than 2 cells filled at any given time.Ī good achievement, in this author’s mind, is something that not only highlights how difficult a given task is, but also encourages the player to think differently about how the game is played.In Klondike, playing the Jack, Queen, and King of any suit to the foundation with no moves in between. ![]() Winning a game of Spider by drawing all the extra cards to the tableau before making a single move.Clearing one Daily Challenge a day, every day, for a month (10 points).Have a Best Clear Time of less than 10 minutes on 3 specific games (10 points).Flipping cards 10,000 times (10 points).Playing all of the available games at least once (20 points).Clearing an entire pack (10 points) or an entire category (10 points) of Star Club challenges.Creating and saving a theme (5 points).Playing (5 points) and winning (5 points) your first Daily Challenge game.The list of Achievements (shown publicly on your XBox Live account), Medals, and Challenge Badges…and a small snippet of the Leaderboards that wouldn’t fit all the way on the screen.Īmong the things that are worth achievements: I’m of two minds on that, but first, let’s look at what exactly MSC thinks is worth a gold medal. Others have mused about the nature of in-game Achievements and Trophies, both for and against. (Of course, it also raised some much-deserved ire when Microsoft revealed it’d be ad-supported and have a “premium” version, but that’s not quite the focus of this article.) It was a sign of the times, claimed the detractors, that players wouldn’t have much reason to play a classic card game unless it were boosting their Gamer Score and rewarding them for dealing their first card from a stock pile. Microsoft Solitaire Collection, the Windows Store (and mobile phone) update of the famous Windows pack-in, raised some eyebrows when it was announced that it would be including challenges and unlockables. But what about people who play for points, or that ever-inconsistent Vegas scoring? What are they playing for, besides racking up an imaginary number? And what happens when a solitaire game adds attainable goals and achievements? It’s easy, for example, to play a game of Pyramid or Aces Up, but even if you win, you won’t have gotten the deck any closer to orderly. Since that post went live, I’ve been thinking about how not every solitaire game out there really has that kind of goal to it. A couple weeks back, I mused about the “goal” of solitaire.
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