Remember playing Solitaire when you were a kid? When you got stuck, did you give up and start over? Or did you cheat so you could win? If you're like Robin and me, you cheated - after all, winning is much more fun - and this card game is for you!

Robin's Cards is shareware; if you like it, you can register for $10. The unregistered version is fully functional, but limited to one deal sequence. So you'll play the same games again every time you start. If that gets boring, just register (it's only $10 - a really good deal). You can pay on-line or by mail, in US or non-US funds, thru the Kagi payment service.

I wrote this game as a present for my wife Robin. She always gets frustrated with computer card games; sometimes after a hard day, she just wants to win a game! So this game lets you cheat, to make it easier to win. But it also keeps track of how many games you win without cheating, so you can still feel challenged.

There are four card games: Patience, Solitaire, Spider and Yukon. You can save a game in the middle, and come back to it the next day. Everybody who uses your computer can have their own game file, with its own count of wins. I've adjusted the rules of each game so you can win about half the time without cheating, if you really concentrate on strategy. Each game has several levels of cheating; with all turned on, it's easy to always win. The best way to see if you like the games is to download!

If you're fealing squeamish about cheating, Robin would like you to know it's ok in solitaire. Robin's a social worker, so she knows about these things. She often plays games with little kids, and she never cheats then! But she says it's perfectly ok to bend the rules in solitaire, because you are only playing against yourself, so changing the rules isn't really cheating!

One thing Robin doesn't like about other card games is that once you've made a move, you can't go back and try it a different way. So Robin's Cards lets you start over from the beginning of any game (with no penalty). You can also mark a spot in the middle of the game, and try again from there. Or undo the last several moves, if things are just not working out.

Another thing Robin really hates is when you tell a game to save a file, and it says "Are you sure?", and you say "Yes", and it says "Do you really want to replace this file?" and you say "Just save it!!!". So Robin's Cards saves files for you, without bugging you about it. You just name the file once, drag it to your Program Manager group to make an icon, and you never have to think about the file again.

I like having the computer make simple moves for me. In regular Solitaire, going thru the deal stack can get pretty boring, so Robin's Cards can do that for you, letting you concentrate on strategy. You can control how much moving the computer does for you, from none, thru turning cards face up, to doing everything. Sometimes, if you turn everything on, the computer gets lucky, and actually wins a game without any help!