Reading cards at arm’s length: a design problem most solitaire sites ignore

Open any major solitaire app on your phone. Hold the phone the way you actually hold it — relaxed, on the couch, arm bent slightly, screen about thirty to forty centimetres from your face. Try to read the rank of the bottom-left card in the first tableau column. If you are over forty, there is a reasonable chance you cannot, and if you are over sixty, you almost certainly cannot.

This is not a player problem. This is a design problem. And it is the kind of design problem most solitaire apps choose to ignore.

The thirty-centimetre rule

There is a quiet assumption inside almost every screen-based product: the user is at “comfortable reading distance” — about twenty-five to thirty centimetres from the screen. That assumption works for a desktop user leaning into a 27-inch monitor. It does not work for a person on a couch with a phone.

A phone held at arm’s length is roughly forty centimetres from your face. At forty centimetres, you need about thirty percent larger fonts and symbols to read with the same comfort you had at thirty centimetres. Solitaire cards on phones are usually smaller than the equivalent desktop cards, not larger.

A typical phone-based solitaire app puts the suit symbol on a card at around 8 to 12 pixels tall. At forty centimetres, that is roughly the same visual angle as 4-point text on a piece of paper. Almost no one over forty can comfortably read 4-point text. The app assumes you will lean in.

The brand promise on most of these apps is “relaxation.” Leaning in is not relaxation.

What 80 pixels actually does

Big Card Solitaire uses 80-pixel-wide cards on every device. That is roughly double the typical phone-card size. Inside that 80-pixel space, the rank in the corner is about 18 pixels tall, and the suit symbol on the face is about 28 pixels. At arm’s length on a phone, those are roughly equivalent to 10-point and 14-point text on paper — comfortable reading sizes, not just legible ones.

The five card-size controls go further. At 200 percent (the “A+++” button), cards are 160 pixels wide on every device, which on a tablet is roughly the size of physical playing cards. People who play with reading glasses on can leave them off. People who normally squint can stop squinting. The board fits in their relaxed field of vision instead of requiring a forward lean.

The cards do not change shape between phone and desktop. The aspect ratio stays the same, the colours stay the same, the contrast stays the same. The only thing that changes between devices is the size of the visible area around the cards.

The other things that come with big cards

Larger cards mean larger touch targets. The minimum WCAG 2.2 Level AAA target size is 44 by 44 pixels. The cards on Big Card Solitaire are 80 by 112 pixels, which is roughly four times the minimum target area. Misclicks are rare. Players who try to tap a card and accidentally tap the stock pile are rare. The friction that quietly drives players away is just not there.

Larger cards also mean fewer cards on screen at once on a phone, which forces a layout choice. The seven tableau columns still all fit on a portrait phone, but only because the cards overlap more aggressively than on desktop. The overlap is calculated so that the top card of any column is always fully visible. You never have to scroll within a column. The whole board is one glance.

Some of this is invisible to a player who has never played a small-card version. Some of it is obvious to a player who switches from a small-card app and feels their shoulders drop. Both responses are correct.

The cost of ignoring this

Solitaire is a quiet retirement of a game. It is also a game disproportionately played by older adults — by my mother on a tablet in the kitchen, by my father on a phone in an armchair, by millions of people who do not show up in the marketing personas that drive design decisions inside large solitaire companies.

When a design assumes thirty centimetres from a desktop, it works for a 28-year-old product manager building it. It does not work for the 72-year-old who is actually playing. The 72-year-old does not file a complaint. They just close the app.

This is the player Big Card Solitaire was designed for.

Try it

Play Klondike now. No signup, no ads, no download. The cards stay 80 pixels even on the smallest phone.

For more on the design choices behind the site, see Why big cards matter for solitaire on a phone and What 80-pixel cards do for accessibility.