Ten years later, and Microsoft is still trying to charge you a subscription to play Solitaire without ads. And pretty much everything else, too.
It’s no joke. I wrote about the Microsoft Solitaire Collection Premium Edition a decade ago, when Microsoft was trying to lure you (or your grandfather) into paying $1.50 per month to remove ads for Solitaire.
Today, that subscription is called the Microsoft Casual Games Premium Edition. And unlike cable, you’re not paying for an ad-free subscription for all of Microsoft’s games at once. Now, each and every game has its own subscription, and each game’s subscription is only valid for a single device. In other words, you can sign up for separate subscriptions to Microsoft Solitaire Collection, Minesweeper, Sudoku, and Wordament, as well as Jigsaw, Mahjong, and Ultimate Word Games.
To be clear, you don’t need a subscription to play each of these games. But each subscription eliminates any advertising, and unlocks bonus moves, replays, or “coins” for daily challenges. If you made a fatal misstep in Minesweeper, you can continue for free. Can’t get past a Mahjong board? A subscription gives you an extra reshuffle.
Mark Hachman / Foundry
An annual subscription isn’t expensive, about $10 per game per year. But if you’re a fiend for casual games, that number will climb quickly: seven games at about $10 apiece is $70 per year, or $140 if you want to play on the road, too. What about your spouse or partner? The money adds up.
Microsoft also makes it very clear that each subscription is locked to the game and to the device upon which it was purchased. “For example, if you purchased the subscription for Microsoft Solitaire Collection on Windows PC, you cannot use the subscription while playing a different game in the collection or on a mobile device,” Microsoft says.
Microsoft does offer Solitaire Collection as a value bundle of sorts. The Collection includes Jewel 2, Gem Drop, Bubble, Gravity Blocks, and Mahjong 3D. I was also happy to discover that the Solitaire Collection is covered by an ongoing Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which already runs $19.99 per month but can be offset or even paid for by Microsoft Rewards.
But still. Look at how irritated people became when Amazon Prime Video started adding ads! Should we mention that Microsoft made $25.8 billion in profits during the March 2025 quarter alone? It all feels petty and cheap.
Remember the days when Solitaire and Minesweeper were just one of those features that made Windows great? There’s something sad to see both games relegated to just another software-as-a-service, paid for by nostalgia and a recurring subscription that will get lost among the credit-card receipts.