March 9, 2024: Finished! – My Most-Played iOS Game

There's one game I play on my iPhone and iPad more than any other: Finished! – Puzzly Solitaire. This is a clever solitaire-type card game where the object is to get all the cards into the played pile. You draw three cards at a time and can rearrange them before "discarding" them and drawing three more cards. Cards have special abilities you can activate with tokens ("candy"), and you're trying to get all cards into the played pile before you cycle through the deck seven times. This is kept track of by spending a cup of "coffee" . . . which, I promise, makes sense in the theme of the game.

Basically, it's a game of memory, logic, and contemplation, as you "sort" the deck into numerical order, a handful of cards at a time. I bought the upgrade, which gives me access to unlimited use of the "Undo" feature, of which I avail myself with abandon. As such, it's a game where I can pretty much win every time, but still have to think about it somewhat and be clever if I want the most points. The game also provides a score, so there's an incentive to do well, although some boards I feel lucky to escape at all.

Finished! is based on a physical card game designed by Friedemann Friese. I haven't played that one (I should probably add it to my holiday "wish list"), but I feel the app form is about as perfect a vessel for the concept as I could imagine. If you were the type of person who played too much Freecell and Klondike on the computer in the 1990s, this scratches many of the same itches even more so.

-- Steven Marsh