3d Klondike

3D Klondike is a 1998 shareware solitaire game from Freeverse Software, built on a tweaked Burning Monkey Solitaire engine and styled around the original Bondi-blue iMac. It plays standard Klondike, but rims the table with clickable, pre-rendered 3D characters who heckle, joke, and toss cream pies as you flip cards.

Gameplay

Standard Klondike rules: build four foundations up by suit from Ace to King while sequencing the seven tableau columns down by alternating colors. The deck cycles in threes, and tucked-away menus let you turn animations, audio, and cheating allowances on or off. Wins trigger a confetti-and-pie victory animation rather than the classic bouncing-card cascade.

The kibbitz crew

The signature gimmick is the audience: caricatured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates avatars, plus a sushi-eating polar bear and a medieval bard, sit around the playfield and chime in with sampled one-liners about your moves. Each character has dozens of lines, and clicking on them directly is its own minor entertainment.

System requirements

Runs on any Mac with System 7.0 through Mac OS 9, fat-binary for 68k and PowerPC. Wants 3 MB free RAM (6 MB recommended), Color QuickDraw, and a display set to at least 256 colors, though the title art is tuned for thousands or millions of colors.

Shareware and legacy

Distributed as a $20 shareware download alongside Freeverse's other late-90s card titles (Hearts Deluxe, Spades Deluxe, X-Words Deluxe, CrossCards). Freeverse later folded the engine and characters into the long-running Burning Monkey Solitaire line on Mac OS X and iOS before the studio shut down.