Microsoft Solitaire Collection

Five solitaires live in this one app, and you probably already know the headliner by heart. Microsoft Solitaire Collection bundles Klondike — the game a generation learned from Windows — with Spider, FreeCell, TriPeaks, and Pyramid, each with selectable difficulty so a deal can be a warm-up or a genuine fight.

The structure around the cards is what keeps it a daily habit. Five new challenges arrive every day, events and weekly rewards add leaderboards to climb, and wins feed an XP system with trophies and achievements to collect. It turns a solitary pastime into a streak you are mildly protective of — miss a day and the challenge archive has a gap in it.

Solitaire is not all that is inside. Microsoft has tucked in a shelf of smaller games — Bubble, Jewel, Gravity Blocks, Gem Drop, and Mahjong 3D — match-3, arcade, and puzzle diversions for when cards stop appealing mid-session. Signing in with a Microsoft or Xbox account saves your progress and awards, and lets you pick the same game up across devices.

Nothing here is complicated, and that is the appeal: the definitive versions of the classics, no rules to learn, a hand in thirty seconds or an hour if the deals keep teasing you. Microsoft calls it the most played solitaire game in history; on the evidence of the daily challenges alone, plenty of people are keeping that record alive.