Games People Play: Goodbye Solitaire Fortune

I’ve got a lot of game apps on my iPhone, and I don’t play all of them equally, but some turn out to be quite fun, and give the allure of being possibly profitable.  Such was Solitaire Fortune, a rather simple, not too flashy take on the classic card game.  You would play your match and you were theoretically matched up with similarly skilled people, and you might do fairly well.  It wasn’t quite as bad as some games I will name in the future where it “can’t find an opponent” when I start to play, but once I put up a decent score, suddenly there’s an opponent who is playing me, and they conveniently get a score just a hair above mine.

Ahem.

I didn’t think Solitaire Fortune was shady, but I could be wrong.  Most of the matches are for money, but some matches were for those of us who didn’t spend anything on the app.  I had built up a decent amount of tokens (or whatever they called them) that allowed me to play free, and several months back, they had had matches where we could bet tokens and win money.  I did fairly well, then hubris (and paranoia that I’d never really get paid) stepped in and I didn’t go ahead and cash out, and went back down to the nothing I started with.  Most of these games make you lose any “bonus” money when you cash out, and they’re a bit opaque about what counts as bonus and what is winnings, anyway, so I’m not sure how much I supposedly lost out on.

Anyway, I had been having fun with the app and had actually considered a Christmas treat of paying in $5 or $10 onto the app to play with and maybe win some more, but then the message came up before Christmas that the game is closing at the end of January, and the cash matches (and all the matches, ergo) were ending a few days after Christmas.

So now I’ll have to find a different solitaire app, maybe one by the MobilityWare people, who seem to do good, non-scammy games.  Although some of these games say I’ll win $10K in a month, and I should quit my job?  Hmmmm….