Fickle Foibles

iPhone · Free

Dwindle

A one-thumb solitaire you can play in ninety seconds. Deal cards into a line, collapse the matches, and watch the line dwindle.

Coming soon to the App Store

A hand of Dwindle in play: cards laid out in a wrapping line on a warm linen table, with three cards outlined as playable. The end of a game: the line has come to rest at two piles, a win. Dwindle's home screen. The same game in Dwindle's dark theme.

One rule

Cards are dealt one at a time onto the end of a line. Look at any three in a row: if the two on the outside share a suit or a number, the one in the middle slides left onto its neighbour, and the line closes up.

10
J
3
7

The 10 and the 3 are both clubs, so the J between them can go.

J
3
7

The J lands on the 10 and the line is one shorter. Four became three.

A pile counts as the card on top of it. One collapse often opens another, and the order you take them in changes how the hand ends — that is the whole game. Keep dealing until the deck runs out, then count your piles. Two is a win. Fewer is always better.

What's in it

Nothing behind it

Dwindle is free. There are no ads, no in-app purchases and no accounts. It does not connect to the internet and it asks for no permissions at all — no camera, no photos, no location, no notifications. It collects nothing about you, ever. See the privacy policy.

Where it came from

The game was taught to the maker by his dad. It is a cousin of the old eliminator patiences — Royal Marriage and Push-Pin, both first written down in the 1890s — stripped back to one rule you can hold in your head.


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