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.
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.
The 10 and the 3 are both clubs, so the J between them can go.
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
- Play a hand yourself, or hand it to the computer and watch at the speed you choose
- A Daily Deal: the same shuffle for everyone, every day
- Simple stats: games, wins, your best, your streaks
- Light and dark themes, two card backs, a left-handed layout
- Soft paper-and-felt sounds and gentle haptics, both optional
- Unlimited undo, and hints for your first three games
- Accessibility options, all optional (see below)
Accessibility
Five options in Settings, all off by default. Leave them alone and the game is exactly as it was at 1.0.
- Four-colour deck
- Diamonds print in indigo and clubs in green, so no two suits share an ink.
- Larger display
- Normal, Large or Larger. It scales the whole interface, cards included, not just the text.
- Reduce motion
- Animations are shorter and gentler, and the ones that repeat (the hint's pulse, the deck's breathing, the win's confetti) stop altogether.
- Spoken play
- The game reads the board aloud. Tap a card or button once to hear what it is, and again to play or press it. The hint button reads out every move you can make. If you can't see the screen: turn VoiceOver off, then triple-tap anywhere with two fingers. The game will tell you it is listening, and the same gesture turns it off again.
- Speech rate
- Slow, Normal or Fast.
Spoken play is the game speaking for itself, not VoiceOver support: the engine Dwindle is built on can't talk to VoiceOver yet, which is why VoiceOver needs to be off.
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.
Release notes
1.1
- Five accessibility options, all off by default: a four-colour deck, Larger display (scales the whole interface, including the cards), Reduce motion, Spoken play (the game reads the board aloud; with VoiceOver off, triple-tap anywhere with two fingers to switch it on) and Speech rate.
1.0
- The first release.