A nice PC card game find of mine is Five Card Deluxe. You build poker hands using four rows. Players play with one 52-card deck. Requirements to run Five Card Deluxe include Windows 98, 64MB ram, and at least a 300 Mhz CPU.

There are four modes of play: Freestyle, Joker’s wild, Challenge, and Tournament. Challenge mode gives poker hands that you must create to advance in this version of the game. The timer will be ticking so get those hands done. Players must earn so many points to advance in levels in Freestyle. Joker’s wild is exactly how it sounds. The jokers are wild and will automatically be assigned the value that will earn you the most points for the hand. The goal of tournament mode is to play through the whole deck and score as many points as you can.

You can double points by making a “run” of completed hands. Set up your board so that once you complete one hand that the next card you can complete another. This will earn you bonus points. Forward thinking ideas of how to earn many points is the only way to advance to high levels. A full house is worth 1000 points no matter what the cards are. Therefore, 2’s and 3’s are the same point value as kings and queens. Double and triple points will help reach goals faster and easier.

The tips of Five Card Deluxe are helpful. While playing Five Card Deluxe, you can just click on the empty square to place the next card instead of dropping and dragging. In a timed game, this can be the difference between achieving and not achieving a goal. You can change the background music by simply clicking the next music track button.

For the new poker player, it can help with learning poker hands and their rank. For the solitaire fan, Five Card Deluxe offers a fun game you can play on your PC by yourself. Be careful to keep track of which cards have already been played. I was working on a nice royal flush but alas, the ten of diamonds was nowhere to be seen. I ran out of cards in my deck, therefore it was game over.

Five Card Deluxe can definitely be time consuming and addictive. As far as a casual game, Five Card Deluxe ranks as a great addition to any game collection.