Parents' Guide to Gnomitaire

This card game initially has a fairly simple premise: players line cards up in vertical rows so the rows contain a card from each of the four card suits. The bottom of the cards in Gnomitaire have one to three additional suit symbols, which indicate which type of card you can place beneath it. If a row has a heart card, for instance, with a club and spade symbol at the bottom, players can line up either a spade or club card underneath it. A gnome watches you drag and drop cards and offers initial instructions.

Playing the basic version of the game would be easy enough, if things were that straightforward -- but they aren't necessarily. As a number of users have commented, the app seems, as of now, to be a bit buggy. One suit symbol at the bottom of a card may be grayed out, for example, and it’s unclear why. In some instances, although a placement seems to be within the rules, a card can't physically be dragged and dropped into place in a row. If there's a legitimate reason for that, it isn't explained clearly in the tutorial shown before playing. The instructions include some visuals, and players can test out moving a card around, but overall, they're pretty brief. The game can be fun when it works -- but the same issues can appear in the Expert and Challenge versions of the game, in addition to the basic version, which ends up turning what would otherwise be a pretty fun, quick round of cards into a potentially frustrating playing experience.