Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo Solitaire 1.0 is a shareware card game released in January 1995 by Mike and Shari Houser of InterStellar Software, the same team behind InterStellar MacCribbage and Egyptian Solitaire. The game is a compact, addictive take on the traditional Monte Carlo patience, played on a 5x5 grid of cards.

How it plays

Twenty-five cards are dealt face-up into a 5x5 grid. The player removes adjacent matching pairs, then the holes are filled in from the rest of the deck. The goal is to clear every card from the board using as few re-deals as possible, and the game keeps a running list of low scores.

Heritage

InterStellar Software built a small line of straightforward, inexpensive Mac card games in the mid-1990s. Monte Carlo Solitaire follows the same design philosophy: one screen, simple rules, fast sessions, and a five-dollar shareware fee.

Distribution

The release was distributed through the Info-Mac archive as monte-carlo-10.hqx and through Macintosh Garden, where it is preserved for the 68k era running System 6.x through 7.6 with Color QuickDraw.

Author contact

The original BinHex header lists Mike Houser at houser@cyberspace.com as the author and direct shareware contact for the InterStellar releases.