One-handed solitaire: why we play in portrait

Every major solitaire on the web is wide. That layout is a fossil: it was designed when monitors were so low-resolution that huge cards were almost necessary just to read the suits, and it never changed. Meanwhile solitaire moved to phones, and your hand is not a mouse-era peripheral. We build ours tall — and we can show you, in feet and miles, what that's worth to your wrist.

The same game, drawn to scale

This is one real deal from our simulation — 103 clicks, a typical game — played twice with identical moves. The red line is everywhere your mouse has to go. Only the shape of the board changes:

Two deals a day = over 1.25 extra miles a year

Small distances compound. An average game is about 109 clicks, and on a wide board each click starts farther from the last one. Playing just two deals a day on a wide solitaire board adds over 1.25 miles of extra mouse travel for your wrist every year — and that's our most conservative case, not our headline case.

Think a smaller screen fixes it?

It doesn't — it makes the gap wider. Our board shrinks to fit your window; a wide board just keeps stretching to fill it. On a laptop, the wide layout wastes proportionally more of your hand's travel, not less. On a 34″ ultrawide it's not even close: the wide layout costs up to 6 extra miles a year.

Built with carpal tunnel in mind

We're not going to tell you a card game is medical advice. But we can tell you why we built it this way: on a wide board your hand travels corner to corner, hundreds of times a session, for an hour at a time. On a tall board every pile sits inside one short, comfortable arc. Less reaching, less travel, a game you can play one-handed without thinking about it — that was the design brief, and we wrote it with carpal tunnel in mind.

And honestly? It's more fun this way

There's a happy accident in playing a tall game on a desktop: it feels like you're playing on your phone. One hand on the mouse, coffee in the other, everything within a flick of the wrist. And because the layout is identical in the free iOS app, your muscle memory transfers perfectly — the browser game and the phone game are the same game, not two different boards wearing the same name.

Tall, vertical, skinny — call it what you like

Players reach for a dozen names when they describe this game to a friend: vertical solitaire, portrait solitaire, tall solitaire, skinny solitaire, narrow solitaire, one-handed solitaire, upright solitaire — even "that solitaire that looks like a phone on my computer." They all mean the same rare thing: a solitaire board built taller than it is wide. Whatever you call it, this is that game — and as far as we can tell, The Original Solitaire+ is the only major one.

Why doesn't everyone do this?

Because the incumbents inherited the wide layout from the desktop era and built everything around it — their sites, their art, their ads. Changing it now would mean starting over. We did start here: portrait first, the clean classic at the core, and one genuine innovation on top — the patent-pending Peek button. A century-old game, finally shaped for the hands that actually play it.