As impressive as the Mac OS might be, Windows users will regard it as having one grave flaw: No Solitaire.

The programmers in Cupertino were show offs and include a Chess game. But Chess requires actual work and thought, which makes it unacceptable for wasting time or avoiding work responsibilities. I mean, jeez, what good is a game that would make you procrastinate about procrastinating.

Fortunately, there are solutions at hand. Burning Monkey Solitaire (Freeverse Software, $24.95 when bought separately, but it is included in Allume Systems game bundles) gets high ratings. However, it doesn't offer a lot of variations and the simian antics of the creatures that populate the game get old very fast. Solitaire purists will prefer Allgood Solitaire by Mike Perry (below; $15 well spent).

Allgood has the key ingredients one requires in a Solitaire game:

• Variety - it has 65 versions of Solitaire, including the well-known Klondike, Free Cell, and Spider games.
• It periodically deals you an easy game so you can win.
• It gives you hints - click on a card while shift lock is on and all possible moves are illustrated.
• You can change the look of the cards to freshen up the visuals.
• Autoplay (automatically moving cards from the tableau - that's the cards you manipulate at the bottom - to the foundation - the stack of ordered cards you are going for) has a clever "safe" mode that keeps any one foundation from getting more than two cards ahead of the others. This is used in games such as Klondike or Freecell where you may lose moves in tableau if Autoplay puts too many cards in the foundation.
• And most of al, it lets you cheat. You can see hidden cards and waive the "kings only" rule for filling empty spaces - the latter being essential to upping your Klondike winning percentage.

Graphics are good, although not a match for SolSuite on the PC. Among the only things that I found wanting were that you cannot drag the play area to expand it, which sometimes results in the bottom edge of the bottom cards falling off the screen.

But most egregious, there is no one-suite Spider. Microsoft put it into recent Windows versions and it is that most wonderful of games - you always win.

Mike, I want to see it in your next version.

(c) 2004 Al Gordon.

In addition to his computer interests, Al Gordon is a principal in the Boston-area strategic consulting firm, Mary Fifield Associates, www.maryfifieldassociates.com

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You can reach Al Gordon at:

al@tnpcnewsletter.com