A free solitaire game that works offline

Try Classic Patience in Games by Zaweba for a free solitaire game that needs no internet. It's the familiar seven-column patience: build each suit from ace to king, with nothing to download, no adverts and no account. The same app also has Spinner Patience, Fairway, Open Cells and Pyramid Thirteens, so you have five kinds of patience in one place.

Everything in Games by Zaweba is drawn and every sound is synthesised in code on your PC. That's why it works on a train, on a laptop with the wi-fi off, or on a PC that never goes online at all.

How Classic Patience plays

You move cards onto the seven columns in descending order, alternating red and black. Only a king can go into an empty column. The aim is to build each suit up from the ace on the four piles at the top right. When you run out of moves, click the deck to turn more cards.

The controls are kind to a quick game. Drag a card where you want it, or just click it and it goes to wherever it fits best. Z undoes your last move, which takes the sting out of a mis-click. You'll find the game on the Cards shelf, or press Ctrl+F in the library and type its name.

Winning more hands

Turn over hidden cards early. Every face-down card in the columns is a card you can't use, so moves that uncover one are usually better than moves that just tidy up.

Be careful about emptying a column before you have a king ready for it. An empty column only takes a king, so clearing one with nothing to put there can leave you with less room than before.

Don't rush cards up to the foundation piles. A low card sent up too soon may be the one you needed to hold a red or black card further down a column. Send aces and twos up freely, but think twice about the middle cards.

And use undo to learn. If a hand goes wrong, stepping back a few moves often shows you the turn where a different choice would have opened things up.

The other four patience games

Once you know Classic Patience, the rest of the Cards shelf gives you different puzzles with the same calm feel.

Open Cells has every card face up, four free cells and a numbered deal, and nearly every game can be won with enough thought. It suits players who like to plan rather than hope.

Spinner Patience is the great two-pack, ten-column game. You build down in any suit, but only a run of one suit moves as a group, and the aim is to clear eight complete runs from king down to ace.

Fairway is patience golf over nine holes. You play cards one higher or one lower onto a single pile and try to clear seven columns in as few strokes as you can, with par set at 36.

Pyramid Thirteens has you take apart a pyramid of 28 cards in pairs that add up to thirteen.

Keeping track of how you're doing

Each tile in the library shows how many times you've played a game, your wins and your best score, and the result card at the end of a hand shows your score next to your best. Scores are kept for each game and mode in a file on your own PC and never leave it.

If patience is your daily habit, star Classic Patience so it sits on the Favourites shelf, or make a desktop shortcut that opens Games by Zaweba straight into it. Esc pauses whenever you need it and F11 makes the table fill the screen, which makes the cards nice and large on a laptop.