Solitaire House

Solitaire House is Ingemar Ragnemalm's 1998 multi-game solitaire collection for the Macintosh, bundling thirty different patience variants behind a unified front end and a scalable layout that fills anything from a 9-inch Mac Plus screen to an 800x600 PowerMac desktop and beyond.

The thirty games

The pack covers the canonical solitaires - Klondike, Spider, Freecell (renamed Napoleon in this build), Montana, Canfield, 40 Thieves, Pyramid - plus a long tail of less-played variants the author wanted available in one launcher. An "inside" view lets you organise titles into virtual rooms: favourites in one, dislikes in another, still-learning ones in a third.

Cards and presentation

Susanne Ragnemalm's honor-card art was an explicit selling point at the time, and the engine ships in five card sizes - including, the author claims, the largest cards then offered by any Mac solitaire. The layout scales to fit any monitor of the era, with thirteen built-in music scores, multi-step undo and redo, legal-move highlighting, and on-line rules for every game.

Engine and platform notes

Solitaire House is a fat binary covering both 68k and PowerPC, requiring System 7.0-7.6 or Mac OS 9 (a 68040 or PPC with thousands of colours is recommended), and weighs in at about 1.5 MB compressed. Macintosh Garden notes that the game runs cleanly under SheepShaver for modern users.

Distribution

The author shipped this entry as the "second upload" of v1.0 to Info-Mac after a previous attempt was lost, asking archivists to file it under game/crd. It is shareware ($20), with auto-save on quit and per-user profiles so multiple players on the same Mac can keep separate progress.