Editorial policy

Every game's rules are checked against a published source

Each game page cites where its rules were verified, and you can follow that link yourself. This is enforced rather than aspirational: a game with no recorded source cannot be published on this site at all — the publishing step reads the citation field, and a game without one stays in draft.

We do this because the first version of this catalogue did not. It was assembled from plausible inference rather than sources, and when the entries were later checked against published rules, a majority of the less well-known ones were wrong. Building rules were inverted. Games were given the wrong number of decks. One game was filed in a family it has nothing to do with. Two games turned out to be one game under two names. Three had no documented game behind them at all and have been removed.

None of those errors were detectable by reading the catalogue carefully. They were only detectable by checking sources, so checking sources is now a condition of publication.

What we do not publish

• Player counts and popularity figures. We do not collect them, so any number we printed would be invented.
• Ratings and review scores. There are no stars on this site and no aggregateRating in its structured data.
• Win-rate statistics of our own. Where a page quotes odds, they come from the cited source and are attributed to it.
• Placeholder assets. No game shows a Play button unless there is something to play. At the moment none of them do, and each game page says so.

Difficulty and skill are different things

Each game reports both, because conflating them misleads. Difficulty is how hard the game is to win. Skill is how much your decisions change that. Some games are almost unwinnable and offer no decisions at all; others are reliably beatable but demand real thought. Those are not the same recommendation.

Best-of lists say how they were assembled

A handful of lists are ranked by an editor. The rest are drawn automatically from each game's recorded facts, and those pages state the exact rule used to select and order them. A list with fewer than three games is not published to search, because it is not a list.

Guides are published when they are written

We plan guide topics in advance, but a topic with no article behind it does not become a page. If a guide is listed, it has been written.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we would like to know — particularly on the less common variants, where published sources sometimes disagree with each other and we have recorded which one we followed. Get in touch through the contact page.

BestSolitaireGames is a reference site. It is not affiliated with any game publisher.