Do you want to click on playing cards in a Jane Austen-themed setting? Of course you do

polygon.com:

Deep in the pastoral county of Dorset in the south of England, Jake Birkett (also known as Grey Alien Games) toils away making a very specific kind of game. He arranges playing cards in pleasing tableaux on the screen, and invites the player to clear them by clicking on them in ascending or descending numerical order; it’s his personal evolution of the TriPeaks solitaire variant. He ensures the clicking is crisp and satisfying, and arranges fun game mechanics and a light storyline — often written by his partner Helen Carmichael — around this deeply satisfying core.

Birkett used to make games for the casual PC gaming portals of the 2000s — sites like Big Fish. As that scene wilted in 2015, Birkett and Carmichael experimented with bringing a game they’d made for Big Fish to Steam: Regency Solitaire, which plays out in a delightful, light-touch spoof of the novels of Jane Austen, as debutante Bella pursues her marital match across the manicured croquet lawns of Regency England. Improbably, the Steam crowd loved it, and it became a minor hit there. Grey Alien then experimented with marrying solitaire with role-playing systems in a couple of puzzle RPGs, the buccaneering Shadowhand and more brooding and dark Ancient Enemy. These are excellent games, but with their XP, loot, and combat, they inevitably lost a little of Regency Solitaire’s ineffable, consequence-free charm.

Now Bella is back in Regency Solitaire 2 (out now on Steam and itch.io), and it’s as light and deliciously insubstantial as a perfect soufflé. This is pure casual gaming, designed to soothe and reward, with just the right amount of challenge and complexity: enough to keep things interesting, not so much that it ever gets remotely stressful.

The plot is that Bella, now happily married to the aristocratic Mr. Worthington, has decided to have a garden party at their estate. Mild impediments arise: Worthington’s rakish young brother elopes with a maid, while his stern mother, the dowager Duchess, frowns in