Regency Solitaire 2 is casual game perfection in a Jane Austen frame

Deep in the pastoral county of Dorset in the south of England, Jake Birkett (also known as Grey Alien Games) toils away making a very specific kind of game. He arranges playing cards in pleasing tableaux on the screen, and invites the player to clear them by clicking on them in ascending or descending numerical order; it’s his personal evolution of the TriPeaks solitaire variant. He ensures the clicking is crisp and satisfying, and arranges fun game mechanics and a light storyline — often written by his partner Helen Carmichael — around this deeply satisfying core.

Birkett used to make games for the casual PC gaming portals of the 2000s — sites like Big Fish. As that scene wilted in 2015, Birkett and Carmichael experimented with bringing a game they’d made for Big Fish to Steam: Regency Solitaire, which plays out in a delightful, light-touch spoof of the novels of Jane Austen, as debutante Bella pursues her marital match across the manicured croquet lawns of Regency England. Improbably, the Steam crowd loved it, and it became a minor hit there. Grey Alien then experimented with marrying solitaire with role-playing systems in a couple of puzzle RPGs, the buccaneering Shadowhand and more brooding and dark Ancient Enemy. These are excellent games, but with their XP, loot, and combat, they inevitably lost a little of Regency Solitaire’s ineffable, consequence-free charm.

Now Bella is back in Regency Solitaire 2 (out now on Steam and itch.io), and it’s as light and deliciously insubstantial as a perfect soufflé. This is pure casual gaming, designed to soothe and reward, with just the right amount of challenge and complexity: enough to keep things interesting, not so much that it ever gets remotely stressful.

The plot is that Bella, now happily married to the aristocratic Mr. Worthington, has decided to have a garden party at their estate. Mild impediments arise: Worthington’s rakish young brother elopes with a maid, while his stern mother, the dowager Duchess, frowns in disapproval at Bella’s frightfully modern tea habit. There’s nothing for it but to clear beautiful, curlicued card layouts on hand-painted backdrops in order to earn gold to spend on ugly statuary for the garden.

Birkett’s solitaire design, refined over many games now, is inflected with an arcade sensibility that’s not a million miles away from classic PopCap puzzlers like Peggle. There are bright, chiming sound effects; there’s a combo score multiplier for clearing long runs of cards; there are unlockable powerups on cooldowns, as well as wild cards you can keep in your hand to get you out of a jam later. There’s a gentle, strategic layer to choosing when to use these to maximize a run, or to get you out of trouble as the stockpile dwindles toward the end of a level. There are no card suits to worry about, but Birkett ensures there’s always plenty going on in the layout to keep you engaged.

Regency Solitaire 2 is a perfect gaming palate-cleanser, a refreshing sorbet to clear the mind between more intense or challenging experiences. That’s not to be mistaken for faint praise; there’s absolutely an art to this, and within the underappreciated field of casual game design, Birkett is a master at work. If there’s a more relaxing game released in 2024, we’ll all be very lucky (and very chill).