Samsung Galaxy / Games > Board / SULTAN SOLITAIRE
REVIEW
Sultan Solitaire picks a harder variant and mostly respects it.
An eight-column, eight-foundation solitaire with no stock pile — a stricter cousin of Klondike that rewards patience over reshuffles. The Galaxy Store build is plain but honest.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Sultan Solitaire
ALGOTECH SOFTWARE PRIVATE LIMITED
OUR SCORE
7.0
SAMSUNG GALAXY
★ 5.0
PRICE
Free
Solitaire on a phone is a problem the industry solved a decade ago, then kept solving anyway. Every storefront — Apple, Google, Samsung — carries dozens of Klondike apps, a smaller pile of Spider and FreeCell apps, and a long tail of variants most players have never heard of. Sultan Solitaire sits in that tail, and it is the variant choice, not the polish, that makes the app worth a paragraph.
The Sultan deal is older than the storefronts. Eight columns, eight foundations, the King of Hearts pinned in the middle as a piece you cannot move, and crucially no stock pile to thumb through when the table dries up. Every card you will ever see is in front of you from the first second. You either find the sequence the deal allows, or you don’t.
The Galaxy Store build from ALGOTECH does the variant the basic favour of not flinching from it. The rules are intact, the table is legible, the undo exists but isn’t pushed at you. What’s missing is the layer of considered presentation and meta-game that would turn a clean rules implementation into something you load on purpose. The variant is the draw, and most of the work is done by the variant.
The absence of a stock pile is the whole point — every card is on the table from the first deal, and the game is won or lost in how you read it.
FEATURES
Sultan Solitaire deals the full 52-card deck into eight columns and asks you to build eight foundations — one per suit pair, with the King of Hearts already locked in the centre as the immovable anchor. There is no stock pile, no draw, no second chance at a card you skipped. Every move you make is a move on cards that were on the table the moment the deal finished.
The mechanics are otherwise familiar to anyone who has played Klondike or FreeCell. Tap a card to auto-move it where it legally fits; drag to place it manually; tap an empty column to park a Queen or rebuild a sequence. The app keeps a session timer and a move counter, surfaces an undo, and tracks win-rate over time in a basic statistics screen.
Monetisation is the standard Galaxy Store free-with-ads arrangement — banner ads at the bottom of the table, the occasional interstitial between hands. There is no subscription tier and no obvious paywall on rules or layouts.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Picking Sultan as the variant is the editorial choice that matters here. Klondike is the default on every storefront and the genre is saturated; an eight-foundation, no-stock-pile game forces a different kind of play, and the developer has resisted the temptation to soften it with hint spam or rewarded-ad shuffles. The deal is the deal.
The table itself reads cleanly on a phone screen. Card faces are legible at one-handed distance, suit colours hold their contrast, and the tap-to-auto-move logic guesses correctly often enough that you trust it. For a small-developer Galaxy Store release, the basics are in place.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Presentation is functional rather than considered. The felt, the card backs, and the win animation feel like defaults rather than choices, and the statistics screen stops at win-rate and average moves — no streaks, no per-deal replay, no daily challenge to bring you back tomorrow. Sultan rewards repeat play, and the app does not quite reward it back.
The free-with-ads model also lands a little heavy for a game this quiet. A one-time unlock at a few dollars would suit the audience for a harder solitaire better than banners under the tableau, and there isn't one. Players who learn the variant and want to settle in for a long session will feel the friction.
CONCLUSION
Install it if Klondike has stopped surprising you and you want a solitaire that doesn't let you fish through a stock pile to bail yourself out. Skip it if you want polish, daily challenges, or a paid tier that retires the ads. The variant is the reason to be here, and on that the app delivers.