Why big cards matter for solitaire on a phone
If you have ever played solitaire on a phone and found yourself holding it closer to your face after twenty minutes, this article is for you. If you have ever watched a parent do that and wondered why the app cannot just make the cards bigger, this article is for you too.
Most solitaire sites and apps were designed for desktops first. When the rest of the world moved to phones, the same designs were squeezed into a screen four times smaller. Cards that were comfortable at four centimetres on a laptop became one centimetre on a phone. The suit symbol on a card became a smudge. The rank in the corner became a dot. The visual story the player needed to read — what colour is on top of that column, what suit is on the waste, what is sitting on the foundation — became something you had to lean in for.
What shrinking the cards actually costs you
Three things stop happening when cards get too small.
You stop reading the board at a glance. Solitaire is a pattern game. Good play looks at the whole tableau and notices “the black six can move under the red seven on column four.” That move only happens if your eyes can take in seven columns at once. When each column is a strip of two-centimetre cards, you have to scroll. You stop seeing patterns; you start hunting.
You stop trusting the touch target. A small card is a small target. Misclicks happen. You end up moving the wrong card or tapping the stock when you wanted the foundation. Each misclick is a small friction. Twenty minutes of small frictions and you stop wanting to play.
You stop relaxing. Solitaire is supposed to be the opposite of stressful. If you have to squint, you are not relaxing. If you have to bring your phone six inches from your face, you are not relaxing. The game becomes work.
Most older players will not articulate any of this. They will just stop playing.
What changing it feels like
Big Card Solitaire is built around a single fixed measurement: cards are 80 pixels wide on every device, every time. Not 80 pixels on desktop and 30 pixels on phone. 80 pixels everywhere. On a phone that means the cards are about twice the size as on a typical solitaire app, and they are roughly the size of the cards on the box of a children’s card game in a store. Big enough that you can read the rank and the suit symbol at arm’s length.
Five card-size controls let you go bigger still — up to 200 percent. The choice is saved in your browser, so the next time you open the page the cards are exactly the size you left them.
The contrast is also pushed harder than most sites. The board is a deep navy, the cards are warm cream, the red suits are a true red, the black suits are a true black. Together they hit WCAG 2.2 AAA contrast for every card on every part of the board. AAA is the highest accessibility standard the W3C defines, and most solitaire sites do not reach it.
None of this is technically difficult. It just had to be the priority from the start. Most solitaire sites prioritise looking polished on a marketing screenshot; this one prioritises a player being able to read the board.
What this is not
It is not a medical product. It will not fix your eyes. It will not make a hard game easier — Klondike is still Klondike. It will not replace any prescription you have, and it is not a substitute for an eye exam.
It just makes the cards bigger.
If that sounds like a small thing, try playing solitaire on a phone for twenty minutes and then come back to this page. You will know what it cost you.
Try it
Play Klondike now. No signup, no ads, no download. Comes with five card-size controls and a hint button.
If you want to read more about the design choices behind the site, see What 80-pixel cards do for accessibility and How we chose Draw-1 only for v1.