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Fairway Solitaire Blast

  • Developer: Big Fish Games
  • Role: Game Designer
  • Engine: Cocos
  • Platforms: iOS, Android
  • Release: December 3rd 2013
  • Genre: Puzzle-Card

Overview

Fairway Solitaire Blast is a casual puzzle card game that blends solitaire mechanics with level based progression and light social competition. Players clear cards by selecting sequential values, creating chains and combos to complete hazards, and strategic decision-making, while incorporating a golf-inspired theme that ties progression to courses and tournaments. 

Levels are designed for short, repeatable play sessions, while emphasizing accessibility and flow to maintain long engagement with a simple but expandable core mechanic. Gameplay is similar to Fairway Solitaire, but focused on a more bite-sized, quick session, and repeat play with boosters, level objectives and modifiers.

Contributions

  •  Created 300+ Levels and set up new areas/themes
  • Set up new and recurring Stick’ems (Sticker Collection feature) and rewards
  • Created Tournament layout 
  • Tweaked and balanced sinks and sources
  • Created Quick Play tournee
  • Event cadence optimization and tuning
  • Dynamic Difficulty tuning of levels with A/B segmentation testing and application of player type buckets
  • FTUE improvements
  • Community goal events

Progression Levels

New Themed Map Areas had a series of levels created with alternating challenges, and difficulties. Released levels were A/B tested to reduce churn and increase monetization, as well as consumable sinks.
I adjusted the streak meter mechanic to be more forgiving to players, as well as the card pull to be less true random, to improve players retention on levels.

Layouts were created to have cards that flipped over multiple sections for a delightful reveal type moment after tenser chunks. I created a new layout for the tournaments, as well as a new quick play mode where levels were 1 stage instead of 3. This became a staple tournament type due to its positive effects on both spend and retention.

I worked with marketing and community on a set event schedule to set an ideal cadence and flow for balancing sinks, sources, and engagement. Some of the successful events were:

Brawlitaire: A tournament that was initially too difficult, so it was moved to a soft day and advertised as a challenge which boosted spend

SASS: An event where players gave a random modifier/ability card to place after getting a streak of 14. This was more of an engagement event.

Medal Tournee: A relaxing tournament where player just try to earn as many medals as possible within a time period.

I also worked with the marketing and community team on community centric events such as:

Blasters vs Blasterds Tournee: This is a tournament where players could play against the devs. They would spot us in the leaderboard and try to beat our score. This ended up being great for engagement, but didn’t become a repeated event due to difficulty with timing for each player’s ideal time zone along with dev time.

Community Goal Stick’em Event: This was an event where we gave players a time period to earn as many Stick’ems (monthly/holiday sticker collection where random stickers appear on each level) as they could together. Players ended up really enjoying an event where they could work together and see the effects of their collaboration.

Fan Vote: Created Stick’em Sets or Tournee types based on what most players voted for within a selection of choices.