The year was 2018, a rainy morning in late October. I'd just arrived to the Oregon Convention Center from my "affordable" little motel room a few blocks up the MLK; a (mostly) unpopulated cloth shopping bag in my hands. This would be the second day of Portland Retro Game Expo, and the first day in which the vendor floor would be open to the public. My shopper's intuition would get a good flexing today, I told myself, and with a sharp nose for good bargains and unusual product, I set to work.
Near immediately, I found the booth of a seller whose purpose I did not glean at first. The thing that had drawn me to them was a big-box Windows floppy-disk version of Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. I was certainly interested in that, and I wasn't about to let it go, but the seller seemed awfully insistent that I look at his other wares. I made him some offers, inspected a couple of other things. It was only when I started peering through the precarious stack of DVD case games that I realized: These are almost all Christian software. There were Gospel-themed screen savers. A CD-ROM release of Bible Adventures. A strangely-thick mini-novel entitled Jesus For The Win. The one that I actually chose to leave with was a copy of a game called Scripture Solitaire, because I guess the Good Lord wanted me to notice at least one thing in that pile. Somewhere in the middle of my handing the proprietor $30 for my haul, his assistant was carefully slipping extras into my bag. The Jesus FTW book was among them, along with a "Red, White and Blue" desktop package and a Star Wars: The Force Awakens collectors' color-changing spoon.
Scripture Solitaire's out of box experience, running Klondike by way of Romans chapter 7, verse 6, on the "More Precious Than Gold" theme.
I didn't get around to trying Scripture Solitaire for almost a week after the convention's ending. I was, shall we say, already quite occupied with testing all the other things I bought at the show. Here's the gist of it: it is, indeed, a solitaire game (shock!), but rather than traditional rank numbers, each card has a 3-4 word segment of a Bible verse on it. In order to sort the cards correctly, you must arrange them in the order that produces that verse. There is a helpful guide on the left side of the screen, which you can turn off if you really think you know your scripture.
Now, in theory this is nice, but in practice you wind up with individual cards that just read things like "delivered from" or "not in the" that don't make any sense on their own. It'd definitely take me a longer time to play a hand of Klondike with this game than if the cards just had numbers on them. Fortunately, that is an option. But so is something else I'll get to.
The preferences menu gives you your choice of theme and game rules, but also lets you choose verses from assorted categories. Hmmm...
As with many other solitaire games of the early 2000s, Scripture has a myriad of customization options. There are 7 built-in themes, with appropriately Biblical names like Sheep of His Pasture, As Iron Sharpens Iron, and More Precious Than Gold. (And then there's... Green Felt.) Each of these contains its own unique card faces and backs. There are also 7 unique solitaire games to play, and only two of them are ones you're likely to have played before, the traditional Klondike and FreeCell variants. The other five are games invented by the developers, with titles like His Yoke is Easy, Noah's Ark, and God's Favor. They, fortunately, include full instructions.
The feature that stood out the most to me, though (for reasons I'm sure somebody will have guessed) is that you are allowed to create your own verse or quote files. By default, the game includes several text files that contain 13-segment verses (one chunk for each rank of card), helpfully organized into categories like inspiration, family, or forgiveness, at a rate of one text file per category. It is not difficult to create these text files yourself. It goes without saying that the developers of Scripture Solitaire expect you to add your own favorite Bible verses to the game. I, however, had a somewhat more secular (and offensive) idea in mind.
I am so going to hell. As if I was not going there anyway, according to some people, on account of so many of my friends being gay and/or trans.
And it was here that I realized that the name of the King (no, not in the Biblical sense) would also be listed as the name of the verse in the menu. Meaning, when I added my "verse" into the game, it identified itself as "What the fuck did", instead of something like "Romans 3:4".
It's about here that I figured that I'd had my fun with it. Given how tricky this was to run, to start with (it has strange graphical glitches on newer computers), I had to install it on my 2000-era HP laptop. The system requirements are fairly modest, at least - a Pentium 100, 32 MB RAM, and Windows 95 or later... and a mouse, the box helpfully specifies - so you will likely not have trouble running it on whatever ancient clunkers you've got lying around. That is, unless you're a very strange person like myself, and your ancient clunker is ancient enough that it might as well be from Biblical times.
Oh, look, the theme files are also loose in the game folder and can be replaced by anybody with a paint program. Which is to say, anybody.
I'm not sure that this is still sold, but in case you're not interested in giving money to a religious organization, I've gone ahead and uploaded it to Internet Archive so that it may be preserved forever. ...And also so that other kindred spirits may have their wicked ways with it, because I'm sure I've only scratched the surface here.