Pull out your clubs (and your diamonds, hearts and spades) and enjoy a round of Fairway Solitaire! This card game includes 70 unique courses in locations ranging from exotic forests to Scottish highlands. Choose your golfer and experience realistic golf commentary, hilarious wild shot cards and three fun mini-games.

If you like solitaire games — especially Golf — ya gotta have this one. I was addicted to it for months and months. Read Fairway Solitaire game review for details.

This $2.99 Catch of the Week runs through Sunday, May 23 at 11:59pm.

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One of the first Windows-based computer games I played was Golf solitaire. I can’t figure out how such a simple game could be so addicting even years later. I bore easily with repetition, but not with Golf. And the game has received some amazing interpretation into adventures including Faerie Solitaire.

The story told in Adventure mode makes little sense even though the game delivers most of it in small bites. So I won’t even go into what it’s about. I’m not sure myself. But the game more than makes up for it.

First, here how the Golf solitaire works: You take cards off the table that are one up or one down from the card in the pile. So if your pile card shows a king. You look for any open aces or queens (they can’t have a card on top of them). Let’s say you find an ace, put that on top of the king.

Now you need either a king or two. Keep taking cards off the foundation until you have no more moves. Then take another card from the stock pile and repeat. Clear the table for a perfect game, a goal you’ll need to reach in order to move on in some levels.

Every level consists of nine rounds of solitaire and has its own goals. You need to reach those goals by the time you finish the nine games. If not, you’ll replay the level. Otherwise, you move on to the next location (it’s that story thing again). Goals can be X number of perfect games, X amount of cash, fill purple meter within X minutes or make X moves in a row (without taking a card from the stock pile). You get cash for every play you make.

Of course, you’ll have power ups and barriers to keep Faerie Solitaire — but not so much that it becomes a confusing mess. Every now and then you’ll get a bonus card between 1 and 10. You can use these cards like you do when you take a new card from the stock pile except these won’t restart your “moves in a row” number so use these cards wisely.

Some columns won’t budge because they’re locked in by a thorn. To unlock the thorn column, you need to clear out the column that has a rose over it. Same goes for frozen cards. You need to clear the cards in front of the fiery one so you can use it to melt the frozen cards, which are always face down.

When you clear a column, you might find a surprise. It could be an egg or one of three elements that you need to evolve your new pet. Eggs appear randomly throughout the game. Finishing Adventure mode won’t ensure you find all the eggs. That’s where the replay value comes in. You’ll want to replay the different modes so you can uncover more eggs.

You can buy special power ups from Faerie Land and visit the Hatchery to hatch your found eggs. Once hatched, the creatures are babies. Each creature has a required amount of elements you need to collect to be able to evolve them. The creatures on the lower end require fewer elements than those on the higher end. It’s not clear what it takes to evolve a creature because I’ve collected the things it needs, but it’s not evolved right away. Nonetheless, it’s still a fun and cool feature.

Special power ups give you another undo (undo the last move), help your pets evolve faster, see the next card in the deck, reveal more cards on the table and so on.

I never once replay a level in Adventure mode. It was a breeze for the most part. The hard part doesn’t come in until near the end and when you unlock and play the five challenge levels. Now those called for a lot of replay until I could beat them. You can also replay any level.

The game had one annoying bug that comes and goes. When you start a new level, it needs to give you the objectives. Sometimes it pops up on the screen before you play and others nothing happen. You can always access the objectives by going to the menu. The game should let you view the objectives without leaving the game.

This is not a lazy game. Golf solitaire requires some planning ahead. Faerie Solitaire with its added barriers and extras calls for more strategy than a basic game of Golf. Although the graphics aren’t impressive and the story pointless, the game had me hooked for the entire weekend and it’s become one of my favorite solitaire games. I still want to play because I want to find the rest of the eggs. But beyond that, I’ll have to move on to another game — but that’s part of a reviewer’s job.

Download Faerie Solitaire.

Playing sports was my thing while growing up, but it was mainly team sports like softball, basketball, volleyball, and soccer. However, I took a few classes or lessons in single player sports like gymnastics, golf, and tennis. Golf just didn’t fit me as holding a club felt awkward. Maybe it was because it was too different from holding a bat. But one golf game that I played numerous times was the card version.

I couldn’t believe I never got bored playing basic solitaire golf that came with Windows in the mid-’90s. I even loaded the game on my Palm handheld and played that for a long time. Since then, I got too busy to play the solitaire game.

Furthermore, after becoming a game reviewer, I didn’t have the luxury of sticking with a game for a long time. Whenever I played a game past my bedtime indicated a sign that a game was a hit and I blamed Fairway Solitaire for my recent tiredness.

The basic game isn’t good enough today. Most of your favorites probably have newer versions containing power ups, trophies, and other bonuses. Solitaire golf receives the same treatment.

The power ups show up in the golf shop. As you play each hole, you earn bucks to use in the golf shop for power ups. For a female golfer, buying a skirt provides her with the ability to x-ray a card to see through it.

The set up cards also contain hazards and bonuses. Because of these, you may not play golf the way you would when playing old-fashioned solitaire golf. Different situations call for different strategies, and that could mean sacrificing a long drive for a short one. A long drive occurs when you pick up at least six cards in a row without drawing a card from the pile, which drives up the multiplier and money pot.

Along the way, you can pick up irons and use mulligans. An iron has a number between one and nine. How a iron works: If there’s a card with an 8 on the board and the golf bag contains a 7 iron, pull it out so you can grab the 8. Mulligans let you undo the last move. Beware that the game only lets you use one mulligan at a time.

Cards that contain a water hazard appear with a light blue shade. When you play these cards, the animation and experience match the feel of a water hazard. Cards in a sand trap won’t flip over until you find the wedge. So instead of making a long drive, you target the cards blocking the wedge to open the sand trap cards.

Although a tutorial explains the game and the different types of cards, it may not click right away. The best way to learn the game is just play it. A hole ends when you either clear the board or run out of cards in the draw pile.

When you begin a round, a positive number appears in the box on the lower left corner of the screen. As you remove each card from the board, the number shrinks. Just like in the game of golf: The lower the number, the better the score. Thankfully, a game with a par 7 goes onto the scorecard as par 5 (the maximum). When the score falls below par, it means more cash.

The end of a hole shows the statistics for that hole including the longest drive, time taken, long drive multiplier, and the cash earned. The scorecard tracks the score for all nine rounds. Players earn bonuses for low scores and successfully completing courses, which unlocks more courses and there are 70 courses available.

As for the Wild Shot mini-game, I wouldn’t call it that. The mini-game is too mini (oxymoron?). You can either play the shot or drop it and lose $200. Playing Wild Shot could lead to either good or bad results. Select “play” to flip the images and select “stop” to stop the images. What happens next depends on whatever image appears. You could lose cards, try to put for a hole-in-one, lose or win money, or gain an extra mulligan. Though I’m not crazy about Wild Shot, it surprisingly contains many possibilities. After playing the game for a couple of days, I continue to discover new possibilities. This is the only handicap of Fairway Solitaire.

Well, the game may have one other mini-game, if you call it that. An optional course appears every few course. Rather than playing it like the others, it’s timed play. If you clear the board before time runs out, the game awards bonus points. A long drive also adds a few seconds to the clock. It makes me cuckoo, but it’s also a nice change of pace.

As a package, Fairway Solitaire offers everything for a grand old time including great cartoon-style graphics, lively music, and addicting play. That’s why it earns fore and one-half stars. Lousy golfers like me have a chance to be winners in golf using cards instead of clubs as our weapon.

Typically after completing a review, I move on to the next game. Not this time. I must play more Fairway Solitaire!

Download and try Fairway Solitaire.

System Requirements

• Windows Vista, XP, 2000
• 800 MHz minimum
• 256 MB RAM
• DirectX 6.0 or later
• 54 MB hard drive space

Bridge Is Cool teaches you how to play mini bridge and regular bridge. Paul and I learned to play bridge with our parents when we were first married and had more time on our hands. Since then, we’ve gotten busy with out children and other things plus our friends don’t know anything about playing bridge. I hope Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s foundation will help bridge get back into action again.

Mattel has instruction sheets for its games and other toys.

EveryRule.com is a difficult to use site and I couldn’t find the instructions I needed. The site also has rules for sports, TV game shows, and party games.

The House of Cards features traditional and family card games, rules, software downloads, and online card games. You can also learn a bit about playing cards and their history.

Monopoly Money – print money when you lose some. Just add pastel paper if you want to match the real thing (the game’s money, not the bucks that buys things). This page also has a guide.

Hasbro games and toy instructions.

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