Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

BEWARE: This program works fantastically on my smartphone, but it locked up my Kindle. ***** for how it works on my Galaxy, but no stars for how it didn't work on my Kindle Fire HDX 8.9" unit. This is an addicting game, so addicting that I almost needed one of the Tri-Anonymous Programs (like AA) to reduce the amount of time I played it on my Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone. I downloaded that version of the game off of the Google Store. The version I downloaded from the Amazon store to my Kindle locked it up without even letting me play even one hand. The rest of this review is about how much I love this program on my smartphone: One neat feature that I loved, at least the first week I had the program, was their weekly contest to see who could earn the most red stars. In this worldwide contest, I came in 74th my first week trying and won 30,000 token coins (see the screen image below), but that is not much when you look at how much it costs to play a single hand of solitaire. If they sold a version of the game that allowed unlimited play for a fair price, I might pay for it, but I refuse to pay 99 cents for ten thousand tokens plus a wild card. By the time you get to the fifth island, it costs 4500 token coins to play one hand of solitaire. I'm writing this on the last day of the second week. My current rank this week is in the 200's, and I don't see getting myself significantly better in rank by 2 am tonight, so I probably will relax and just enjoy a few games for the fun of it. The program is always offering to sell you more coins. I made it my policy never to pay the program for tokens, but when it tried to give me deals just for tokens, I did try them out. Not knowing how long the "Power" would last, I used 6000 tokens to get extra time on a 1500 token game, and that power only lasted for one hand, which I lost anyway, so that was a waste of tokens. On the initial games, you can "purchase" five extra cards after your deck is exhausted for half of the entry amount, but by the higher levels, that bonus is double the entry amount. Since the probability of your getting the card you need seems slim, I find it better NOT to bother to try to pay for this privilege, unless it will get me a red star. After all, it's cheaper just to cancel the game, get a few points for whatever streaks I did get, then play again. You can actually play MANY hands for free as long as you are willing to take a break for a few minutes on occasion. They have daily bonuses and every-20-minute bonuses. The first time you play the game each day, they give you 3000 points. On the fifth island, that pays for six entry fees, but when you take into account winning points, you might get 8 or 10 games out of that 3000, and even more if you play on the lower cost islands. Every 20 minutes, you can recharge your token supply with at least 1000 tokens, up to as many tokens as you need for one game. If you have 200 coins in your stash and your highest level game costs 4500 points to play, the game will give you 4300 coins when you request it, then reset the timer so you can't get more free coins for 20 minutes that way. You can earn about a thousand free coins a day by watching videos, 100 coins each video. I use this when I have fewer tokens than I need for one game and don't want to wait for the timer to reset. I wish they did similarly to some games and let you earn greater numbers of coins by trying out various offers. I got a lot of coins from one of those token-sliding-games like I used to see in pizza shops by getting a Home Depot quote on heating and cooling, but that option was not available in this game. I do have a strategy when I am enjoying a few games. I try to spend down as many coins as I can before the 20 minutes is up, so that I get the maximum number of free coins. If my most expensive game is a 4500 coin entry amount (I do not know how high these amounts go) and I have 3500 in my stash, I only earn 1000 coins, but if I have 50 coins in my stash, I earn the full 4500. I get enough coins to play the most expensive game once, then my winnings from each game I play will allow me to play several games, going back to cheaper islands until I'm below the number of coins I need to do me any good. Each island has 18 levels of play, and some of those levels are easy, and some are hard. You can earn three stars for each level. The gold stars stay on your record forever, but the red stars are erased and you start over each week with a new contest. Island one has several costs, 50 coins to play levels 1 and 2, 500 coins to play levels 3 to 8, and 1000 coins to play levels 9 to 18. Each of the other islands I've visited so far (and there are many, I don't know how many) have all had the same entry fee for all 18 levels on that island, 1500 coins on Island 2, 2500 on Island 3, 3500 on Island 4, and 4500 on Island 5. As I said, this is a very addicting game, but you can play it totally for free if you have good willpower. There are some bugs in the program that the programmer(s) need to fix. I will describe them in the COMMENTS section for this review so that I can point the company to this comments area for them to find and fix the errors. I highly recommend this game to anyone who can refuse to pay extra to play, but if you have a weakness and are willing to spend 99 cents here and $2.99 there, just to get that extra star, the I do not recommend this game to you, unless you have a monthly game spending budget and can stay within that budget. John, avid player and former game designer (This week, I broke my addiction to this game by spending many hours creating 204 web pages that together list EVERY 32-bit prime number, over 203 MILLION of them, with the highest 32-bit prime well over four billion. Let me know if you need the web address by leaving a comment below.)