Mondo Solitaire Cards too small on iPhone/iPod Touch

phoneuser · Post by **phoneuser** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 5:16 pm

I really like your solitaire on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Mostly I just play klondike, and occasionally pyramid.

But I have had to stop playing because the cards are so small I just can't see them well enough. I get a dreadful headache from trying to squint to see them.

There are other solitaire games in the app store, but I like the game play of yours best of all. I just wish you would make the cards bigger and the numbers and suits easier to identify.

Thanks!

Post by **gandreas** » Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:48 am

We are currently working on adding an additional deck style to improve the readability (plus we've been making other similar changes as well, such as increasing the default spacing between cards in piles to show more of the lower cards).

One of the biggest problems, however, is that there are hard limits on the sizes of cards - you need to be able to see the entire layout on the screen at once, and if there are N piles, then the cards can't be larger than screen size / N. (An earlier version included the ability to zoom in and scroll, but it turns out that it made just about every game extremely frustrating - you really need to be able to see all the cards at a glance to be able to play).

phoneuser · Post by **phoneuser** » Sat Aug 09, 2008 1:19 pm

Thanks for the reply.

Check out the card graphics used in the mobilityware and other solitaires. It is perhaps not very pretty but it is very easy to read.

Thanks again.

Post by **gandreas** » Sun Aug 10, 2008 1:07 pm

It's actually far more subtle than that, however, because we've all had a lifetime of pattern recognition to make it easy to spot, for example, a 4 by the pattern of the pips. So if you're looking to see if you can move a 3, you can quickly see if there is a pattern shaped like the corners of a rectangle (and if it's a line or a lot more, then it's not a four - and certainly if there a picture there, it's a face card). So while larger numbers and a single pip may be easier to read, it's harder to tell at a glance (since you need to explicitly read each and every card)

Still, the artist that we've been working with has been tuning a special set of images that should improve the readability as an option for the next release.