“Candy Crush Solitaire,” mobile game developer King’s latest sugar-coated game in its popular “Candy Crush” franchise, launches Thursday. And while the title is definitely targeted at players who are already used to spending their phone time matching three with the Microsoft-owned “Candy Crush Saga,” it’s also King’s answer to “Balatro” and the renewed popularity of digital card games.
“This is the first game that we’ve launched outside of match-three genre,” “Candy Crush” franchise general manager Todd Green told Variety. “So all of the other ‘Candy Crush’ games up until now have been some variation on switching and completing different puzzles. Solitaire is different but an adjacent genre for us to go into, and what we’re trying to do here is to bring the best of what we’ve learned about making fantastic ‘Candy Crush’ games and apply them to a new type of game.”
In “Candy Crush Solitaire,” TriPeaks solitaire gameplay features familiar “Candy Crush” characters that join players on a sweet journey around the world, collecting Candified postcards and delicious rewards as they progress through the game, solving puzzles and stacking cards.
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“There have been solitaire games for years and years and years,” Green notes, pointing in particular to parent company Microsoft’s (which acquired King in 2023) decades-long foothold in the category. “So if we’re going to do this at all, we want to try to do something new. And that’s where the bridge between the two comes in.”
“In each level, what you’re doing is trying to collect up the cards,” Green says. “So you have to do that in a sequence. So let’s say I’ve got a number nine on top of my pack, I need to clear either an eight or a 10. And the cards are stacked up, so I can’t necessarily access every card from the first moment. So it matters what choices I make. Now to bring something new, and specifically to bring in or to combine in some of what we think makes the ‘Candy Crush’ games so special, we’ve done a couple of adjustments to the formula.”
Among the key features King is promoting for the game are the “Hold Slot”, which allows players to set cards aside for later use, and the use of “Candy Crush Saga’s” Candy Color Bomb booster and Lollipop Hammer to navigate tricky levels.
“We talk to thousands of players a year, every single week of the year, and we’re asking a bunch of questions, both about our games and also trying to understand: what else do you do with your time? What do you do outside? What do you use your phone for? What other games do you play? And one thing we noticed was there’s quite some overlap between our existing games and solitaire,” Green said. “We felt like that was a gap where we could, if we could create a great product, which I think is now what we’ve done, we would have both a ready-made audience who we know already likes to play those games, and maybe able to pull in a new audience as well.”
One of the “most important things” in the process of building the game in order to appeal to both solitaire players and “Candy Crush”-ers alike has been balancing out the game’s levels so they “hit that sweet spot between enough challenge to make it rewarding when you succeed, but not so easy that it gets boring.”
Green says King has spent years polishing “Candy Crush Saga,” first released in 2012, with focuses on everything from “honing the falling of the individual candies and how they do a little bounce as they come down the screen” to “when you wipe out a whole line of candies, how that looks and feels.”
“The game is radically better than what it was seven years ago, and significantly better, I would say, than one year ago, even,” he said, noting that all those lessons have been taken into the development and updates to “Candy Crush Solitaire.”