A free anti-suppression solitaire computer program

In 'Vision therapy - week 2' I talked about using anti-suppression playing cards as part of my vision therapy. Remember these?

Well, I really like these cards. They let me play fun games while I'm doing my vision therapy, and I feel like they have helped me a lot. And a while ago I started wondering, why isn't there a version of this for the computer?

So I started looking for a solitaire program that would let me edit the card faces. I found one, put on my red/green glasses, played around with the colors, and voila! Here is the finished product:


The program is called Solkan Solitaire. Here's some reasons why I chose this program:

-it's free
-it has nearly 200 games
-you can change the background of the playing space
-you can change the size of the cards
-it was easy and fast to edit the card faces
-so far it seems to work on Windows XP and Windows 7

It does have a few cons though:

-it didn't work on my friend's Windows 7 64 bit system (it works fine on my Windows 7 laptop, though)
-the background of the card faces has to be the same for all cards. Thus, I can't have some suits have red backgrounds and other suits have white backgrounds, like the original cards. So, I chose a black background for the card faces.
-it can be hard to decide which of the 200 games to play, and some of the games are quite difficult
-I don't know if it works for Mac

All in all, though, I think it's great.

If you would like to download it, you have two options:

Option 1: This is a folder that contains the program and the edited card faces. All you have to do is unzip the folder, put the folder wherever you like on your computer, and click on solkan.exe to play it. Click here to download Option 1

Option 2: This is the installation .exe file and a folder of edited card face files. The .exe file will install the solitaire program on your system and create start menu shortcuts and the like. You will then need to open the folder that I included called "dck files", and copy those .dck files into the folder where Solkan Solitaire installed on your system. You will be overwriting the default card faces with the new ones that I made. Click here to download Option 2

Option 1 is the easiest, but in case it doesn't work, try Option 2.

(Sorry for the ads and pop-ups on the download website. It's the price you pay for free file hosting...)

After you open the program, I recommend changing the background to something non distracting. I chose gray. If you want to change the background to a solid color, go to options --> background --> then hit the "color..." button.

And remember, you need red/green glasses to use this program. If you don't have any, pester your vision therapist until they give you some. Red/green glasses are a basic human right!

I hope you enjoy playing this, and keep working hard to break that suppression.