Most of the people who play Solitaire on our site do it on a phone, held in one hand, often on the sofa in the evening. Many of them are over 60. Until this week our Klondike layout on phones was simply the desktop layout squeezed into a tall screen: the deck in the top corner, the buttons in a toolbar at the top, and the cards small.
On a 6.5" phone held in one hand, the top of the screen is the hardest place to reach. And the deck is the thing you tap most in Klondike. So we rebuilt the portrait layout around the thumb.
What changed
A bottom bar instead of a top toolbar. Settings, New game, Hint and Undo now sit in a bar at the bottom, as big icon buttons with a label under each one. Undo is on the right, where a right thumb rests. Time, moves and score stay in a slim strip at the top, because you read them but never tap them.
The deck can live at the bottom. In the settings sheet you can choose Deck position: Top / Bottom. At the bottom, the deck and the waste pile sit just above the bar, so drawing a card is a short thumb move instead of a stretch. A small badge shows how many cards are left in the deck.
Left or right hand. A Hand setting mirrors the deck and Undo to the other side. It's a small thing, but without it a left-handed player has to reach across the whole screen for every card.
Draw 1 or Draw 3, from the next deal. The choice used to be buried in a menu. It's now the first row of the settings sheet, and it applies from the next deal so a game in progress never changes under you.
Columns use the whole height. In portrait there's a lot of empty felt under the columns. Long columns now fan down into that space before the cards start to overlap more, and face-down cards squeeze first so the face-up ones stay readable.
Dragging feels lighter. While you drag, the card lifts slightly around your finger, every legal drop shows a soft glow, and the one under your finger glows stronger. Tapping a card still sends it to the best place, so dragging is optional.
Landscape and desktop keep the original layout. The whole portrait mode is one class on the body, so the CSS stays scoped and nothing else moves:
portraitLayout() { let on = false; try { on = matchMedia('(orientation: portrait) and (max-width: 700px)').matches; } catch (e) {} document.body.classList.toggle('np-sol-portrait', on); this._portrait = on; } Top or bottom? We don't know yet, so we're testing it
My guess was that the bottom deck is better. But players who have used Solitaire for 30 years expect the deck in the top corner, and "easier to reach" doesn't always mean "feels right".
So players who never touched the setting get one of the two positions at random, once, and keep it. An explicit choice in the settings always wins over the test:
let ab = null; try { ab = localStorage.getItem('np-sol-ab'); } catch (e) {} if (ab !== 'top' && ab !== 'bottom') { ab = Math.random() < 0.5 ? 'top' : 'bottom'; try { localStorage.setItem('np-sol-ab', ab); } catch (e) {} } // logged once per player as an event, so we can compare the two groups What we'll compare per variant: how many people leave in the first 10 seconds, how many games get finished, how many are won, play time, and how many come back the next day. Finished games matter more to us than taps: if the bottom deck makes people quit fewer games, that's the answer.
The test started today, so there are no results yet. I'll post a follow-up when there's enough data to say something honest.
Small things we learned on the way
- Put a word under every icon. A gear or a lightbulb is obvious to us; it isn't to everyone. "Settings" and "Hint" cost a few pixels and remove the guessing.
- Don't change the rules mid-game. Draw 1 / Draw 3 applies from the next deal, so a game in progress never changes under you, and daily puzzles and duels keep the rules everyone else plays with.
- Keep the bar out of the system gesture area. On phones with a home indicator, the bar needs
env(safe-area-inset-bottom)padding, or the Undo button fights with the swipe-home gesture.
If you want to try it, it's at nitroplayer.com/games/solitaire. It works best on a phone, held in one hand. I'd love to hear where you'd put the deck.
