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Championship 500, Championship Cribbage, Championship Euchre, Championship Gin, Championship Hearts, Championship Spades By DreamQuest Software, Price: $19.95 each or 3 for $39.95
Reviewed by Darren Behan June 2004

With solitaire included as a part of Windows since v3.1 and included on every PPC shipped, many an hour has been spent on this ubiquitous card game. For people looking for something different, there has long been a variety of poker and blackjack games out there. But if either of these aren't your bag, there weren't a lot of other options to choose from. The folks at DreamQuest Software, however, have come up with six (count 'em six!) classic card games: 500, Cribbage, Euchre, Gin, Hearts and Spades to satisfy your appetite for something different. But are these games you want to hold or want to fold? Read on to find out…

Installation is the usual ActiveSync affair and went without issue and the games run fine from a storage card. As a matter of personal taste, I would have preferred all the games to be installed under a parent directory instead of each to their own but this is admittedly a small point and totally personal preference. One thing that you may note, however, is that AppForge Booster is installed along with the games. The games require it but there isn’t really anything you need to do with it. I banished the shortcut to a little used directory and have forgotten about it quite successfully.

When you start any of the games for the first time, you'll be asked if you want to take an interactive tutorial to learn how to play the game. (Don't worry if you hit no, you can always come back to it anytime via a the help menu.) These tutorials are both helpful and thorough in learning the basics of the game and you can pretty successfully learn a game that you have never played before. They won’t turn you into an instant champ but you can get a good grasp of basic game play. Fortunately, you have the option to select from five levels AI difficulty and I suggest starting on either Beginner or Novice when learning a game until you get the hang of it.

The entire interface is driven by stylus taps (i.e. tap a card for discard, tap anywhere else on the table to discard it, etc.). Personally, I like this approach as it avoids dragging the stylus across the screen too much over the same spots. Every move you need to make is also indicated by an on-screen prompt. Once you’ve played a game for a while though, you pretty much know where you’re at/what to do and I would have preferred either an option to turn this feature off or a less intrusive graphical element to indicate whose turn it is. I was actually surprised that this was not available given the myriad of other options there are. Clearly a lot of though has gone into the technical make-up of these games and to providing a good deal of customization of the experience. You can set all sorts of variables for the actual game (i.e. bonus points, opponent graphic, time between deals, etc.) and dialogs that show post-game scoring can be turned off.

While technically well put together, visually stunning they are not. The graphics are certainly functional but also quite basic. If you are looking for a pretty interface with wood grain tables ala PDAMill’s GameBox Solitaire I & II then you’ll need to look elsewhere. The audio is also similarly barebones. You get the usual shuffling and dealing sounds and a some slide-whistle sounds increasing or decreasing in pitch depending on the outcome of the hand but that’s pretty much it. If you’re not particularly concerned about such things though and want just want to play a good game of cards, DreamQuest’s offerings don’t disappoint.

One key feature that needs mentioning is ability to play online. This is accomplished from within the game via a menu item. You are then taken to all available games hosted by GameSpy. You can join any active game with an open spot in it from one of three available rooms. With a non scientific sampling, there appear to be between 10 and 20 games available on average very heavily leaning towards Hearts and Spades. Game play is exactly as it is offline and works well. Included is the ability to send & view chats as well as macros (which are basically a way to send messages with a few keystrokes). On the whole I liked this feature but two items stuck out as real issues in my mind: 1) You do not have the ability to initiate a game. That is, you can only join an existing game so if no one is playing what you want to play, too bad. 2) While you can see other types of games available, you can only join the game from which you entered multi-player. For example, you are in Gin and you try to find a game online but they are all full or no one is playing it but see that there is an open spot in a Hearts game. The only way for you to join that game is to close Gin, open Hearts, go to multi player and then join the game assuming the spot is still open. I think it is a good idea to show all the games available but it would be nice if the games were ‘aware’ of each other on the same PPC. (On a somewhat related issue, you cannot access the other installed games from within a game. There is an ‘Other Games’ menu item available but it only pops up a reference to the DreamQuest website. I’m not sure how much of a technical hurdle this is but it would seem to me that you could add a menu item for each installed game.)