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Adding to its catalogue of titles, Revills Games has released Santa's Christmas Solitaire 3.  This mixture of card and mini game action is built around a festive holiday adventure.  You join this adventure in an attempt to solve the mystery of what happened to all the missing presents that Father Christmas was planning to deliver on Christmas Eve.

Aided by elves and fairies, you can set about creating the game's working environment.  When deciding on this environment, Revills Games offers a wide range of options.  The usual options of adjusting volume levels for various sound elements and background brightness are present along with a choice of card face and back designs.  You will also be granted the ability to switch off a mini game feature appearance occurring at regular intervals with or without a timer option plus a choice of eight different mouse pointer cursor.  I opted for a gloved hand that was easily identifiable against various backgrounds.  The game also offers four different levels of difficulty.  They are entitled Relaxed, Casual, Normal and Hard.

The Solitaire game spreads its action over 24 chapters that each contain ten levels of clearing card layouts plus a light sprinkling of extra treats to test your skills.  With Freeplay selected as an ideal starting point, you can them make a difficulty level choice plus decide on the type of puzzle to be featured for the current chapter. This selection can be made from a choice of Up/Down. Match 3. Match 14 or Random. 

Following a brief section of a narrated story, each chapter will open with a Hidden Object type mini game scene.  Once completed you can then play the ten Solitaire levels.

Whether you have opted for Up/Down, Match 2 (removing pairs), Match 14 (removing two cards whose face value adds up to 14) or random, the game could then introduced a variety of different options.  Sometimes an Undo, Wild or Joker card will be made valuable.  Occasionally one of the layout cards will be overlaid with an additional graphic layer.  This layer could represent a padlock, tree, ice, snow, candy cane or Christmas bow amongst others.  In order to remove this layer and free the card for removing, you will need to find the appropriate tool such as scissors, axe, hammer, key and target the card more than once.

Featured within the main Solitaire aspect of the title are a number of mini game puzzles.  You could be asked to play a game of memory as you find matching cards laid face down; find the penguin shown on one of four shuffled cards; decide whether the next card will be higher or lower than the previous card or win a hand of Blackjack.  Other puzzle types include play a slot machine, play a short match 3 game and put together the pieces of a jigsaw.

Rewards, in the form of coins earned by completing the ten levels of each chapter plus tackling the various mini games, can be used to purchase tools from a built-in store.  These feature offers a choice of 30 different tools than are spread out over two screens. They provide the means to help with the removal of certain Solitaire layouts but generally I rarely felt any need to use them.

You can download this title from Gamehouse.com where it is priced at $9.99.  The game requires a  1.0 GHz processor with 256MB of RAM and 110MB of hard disk space running Windows 7 and later. 

Santa's Christmas Solitaire 3 | GameHouse