XP Arcade: Ryukyu

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

One of the things that makes poker work is the same thing that can make certain video games work. It’s easy to just pick up and play without knowing all of the nuance and details, but for consistent, high-level play, you’re going to need a deeper understanding. And hey, a little bit of luck wouldn’t hurt, either. Which makes a poker game — of basically any poker variant — a sensible choice for a video game. There’s a reason that digital poker games have existed on computers for decades and why there are endless options for poker apps on smartphones, and they can end up being a less intimidating way for someone to get used to the ins and outs of the game, as well, or even just as a refresher for veterans when they can’t get a physical game in — in the week or so before I play a game of Texas Hold ‘Em with some friends, I tend to put some time into the poker game that’s installed on my phone, to get a feel for the flow of the game again and put me in the right state of mind for that particular variant.

Solitaire, too, has decades of success and proliferation on computers and phones: a single-player experience with its own slew of variants, solitaire is a “patience” game, meant to be replayed again and again until you successfully remove all cards from play. It’s one that both of my parents enjoy, in very different ways: my dad, who has never sent an email in his life and only learned how to send texts within the last couple of years, would pull out a deck of cards and play solitaire while the television was on in the background, which was my introduction to the game, while my mother picked up the habit when her work computer had it installed — while she would play the standard solitaire that people are most familiar with, the one explicitly named “Patience” and from which the genre name derives, the multi-deck Spider Solitaire was her game of choice. Thanks to growing up in this environment, I’m as liable to play a game of solitaire on my phone while I look for a way to kill a little time as I am to pull out a deck of cards if I’ve got access to them, to do the same (though, admittedly, using the actual deck of cards serves as a better way to relax and center myself a bit).

There’s a game that actually is both poker and solitaire at once, because of course there is. You’ll want to sit down before you hear what it’s called: Poker Solitaire. Sometimes you just have to let the people know what they’re getting into, you know? This, too, is a patience game — Patience Squares and Poker Patience are its alternate names — but instead of clearing an entire deck in order one move at a time like in standard solitaire, you’re attempting to build the best series of five-card poker hands that you can in a 5×5 grid. Unlike with standard solitaire, but like with poker, the entire deck is not in play given that grid will fill up with just 25 of 52 cards, which means you need to do some odds calculations for what’s in play and what could be in play.

Think of it like this. If you’re playing poker with pals, you don’t necessarily know what cards are in the hands of your opponents since they’re all hidden from view, leaving you to work off exclusively what’s in your own hands in terms of odds — for example, knowing that your chances for getting an inside straight is lower than an outside straight, since an inside means you need one specific card in the middle of the straight, while an outside has you looking for one of two different cards to complete your straight on the “ends,” allowing you to be a bit more rationally aggressive with your bet and your optimism. But if you’re playing a poker variant in a casino as a table game, part of what goes into your decision to bet or check or fold is the cards of everyone else sitting at the table. If you’re looking for a second Jack to either give you a pair or three of a kind, and two other Jacks are already in play in the visible hands of other players, well. Your odds of seeing one show up on the flop, turn, or river are a lot lower than if yours was the lone Jack in play, given there’s now only one left on the board out of four, and you need to act accordingly.

Poker Solitaire combines that need for some lucky guesses with the calculation of odds, and, of course, patience. The result is a lovely game, where you build hands vertically and horizontally in this 5×5 grid, allowing for a maximum of 10 hands to be scored, where 200 points is the minimum needed to claim victory. Since a single pair is worth two points and even a Full House is worth just 25, you’re going to need to be efficient and thoughtful with your card placement.

The point system meant that Poker Solitaire was an excellent candidate for adaptation into a video game, and that’s what happened — calculations in something like this can go a little smoother when the computer is doing it for you and all. The transition to computer game also allowed for Poker Solitaire to end up with its own variants, however, that leaned further into the possibilities of the platform instead than, say, a “port” of Hold ‘Em could. That’s where Ryukyu comes in.

Released in 1989 in Japan for the PC-98, X68000, and MSX, Ryukyu was developed by ASCII and published by Login Soft, and it brought change to the game of Poker Solitaire. It would be ported to arcades by Success — the developers of the Cotton series of shooting games — and Sega on the Sega System 16 board, and then received additional ports to the PC Engine and Game Gear, both of which were published by Face, the studio behind Money Puzzle Exchanger. The Game Gear port removed the Ryukyu branding for international release, and was simply known as Solitaire Poker. In 2025, Hamster’s Arcade Archives series released Success’s arcade port internationally for the first time, likely in part because Success developed a sequel to the game exclusives to Japanese arcades, earlier in the year — a little bit of everyone remembering that the game exists at all. It’s this Arcade Archives version, specifically, that is getting a look today.

Named after a chain of Japanese islands that includes Okinawa, this adaptation of the patience game has some specific wrinkles to it. For one, there are 12 hands scored now, as the two center diagonals are their own five-card hands, and you are pulling from four separate card stacks, each of which has the first three cards visible. Rather than being able to place cards anywhere on the 5×5 grid, you’re also forced to consider this as not just a Poker x Solitaire experience, but also a falling-block puzzle game, as well. You “drop” a card onto the grid from the top of a column, which, when combined with the knowledge of what the next three cards in each of the four stacks available to you, means you need to be planning ahead in order to maximize scoring in the most effective way.

If you can see 12 of your available cards, and you already know what’s on the board and what you need, you have to make odds calculations on the fly, while knowing you might never actually see what you need — this in turn should influence what kinds of hands you’re even attempting to build from the jump, but be warned, there’s a timer at play here, both in terms of in how long you have to make a play, and overall, in that you will score more bonus points after the round the faster you’re able to complete it. You have three “Cancel” plays as well, if you decide you made a mistake or playing a card revealed the next card in the stack and you aren’t happy with the result for one reason or another. Be warned, though, that the unplayed Cancels are worth points at the end of the stage, in the same way that unused bombs in a shoot ‘em up are — if you want to maximize your score, you’re only going to want to cancel when you have little choice otherwise, or if doing so will be worth more to you than the bonus would be.

There are your standard 52-card deck options, presented as tiles, as well as a single Joker. The Joker allows for you to make the highest-scoring hand in Ryukyu, which isn’t the Royal Straight Flush, as is traditional, but instead a “five-card” hand. Four-of-a-kind is typically the best you can do in this regard, but if you manage to get four Aces the old-fashioned way, and then slap a Joker on top of it? That’s five-of-a-kind, and worth 3,000 points at its base level.

“At its base level,” because Ryukyu also includes the occasional multiplier: as you progress in the game, you’ll see certain squares on the grid are subtly flashing — these will double the score of the hand you make using them. A Full House is a fairly reliable hand you can make again and again in a single Ryukyu board with some foresight, so it’s worth a mid-range 1,800 points. A Full House made with one of those multipliers in play, though, is 3,600 points, which outscores the base point total of the exceptionally rare five-of-a-kind. Play the odds, kids: there are better hands in terms of total points, but you have to play what’s likely and will pay off. Which is also why — just like in another video game adaptation of cards, Balatro — it’s not recommended that you focus on the somewhat limiting Flush, especially because you’ll get just 1,000 points from it, and since you’re basing your decisions on suit rather than card value, building additional hands from those tiles might not work out as well as if you were instead going for, say, a straight.

It’s vital that you keep track of where everything you’ve played is after you’ve already initially scored from it: you’re building an interconnected grid here, and cards you’ve been done with for some time will come up again. Take the above video, for example, which kicks off with me 1,600 points shy of the 9,000-point “Clear Point” of the round, with just two moves left to go. The right plays, though, can cover that seemingly significant amount in short order.

First, the 6 of Spades is used to score a two-pair, with Queens and Sixes, which grants access to another Queen. While the row with most of the Queens is already full thanks to the previous turn, there is a Queen in the very middle, as part of a diagonal… and that same diagonal includes a Joker tile that was used early on in place of a Queen to complete a straight at the bottom of the grid. So, there’s still a place for the Queen, even if placing it in that last spot “limits” the column it’s in to a Kings-based three-of-a-kind, one of the lower-scoring results, as what you instead get by dropping the Queen there are two separate three-of-a-kind hands in different directions, as well as the pair of Fives in the top horizontal row finally scoring because the Queen’s placement closed that row. Just having one move left can mean more than just having one hand left to score, so it’s vital you think efficiently with a mind toward maximizing scoring at basically all times. Build a strong foundation, and hope the materials you need to build the rest of the house come in when you need them to.

And here’s a video showing those flashing grid spaces in action: there are five moves left, and while the lower clear point of 6,400 — more on that momentarily — means that the current score of 6,800 is already sufficient to progress, there’s still a whole lot of points that can be wrung out of what’s left, with some careful deliberation and proper Joker placement.

Using the Joker tile where I did — in the grid with multiplier spaces — made it easier to pull off a very late-game straight, which was then worth 2,800 points instead of the standard, more ho-hum 1,400. Waiting to sort it all out cost me a little bit in the way of points, but each additional second spent is just 10 points fewer — figuring out the order of operations there for the last five moves netted an additional 4,400 points, plus a bonus of 10,560 at the end.

Ryukyu is extremely difficult to progress in, owing to both the need for strategy and for luck, so taking these moments to figure out how to squeeze the most points possible out of your game board in a given round is vital — that strategy might have seemed like overkill or extra in a round where the score threshold had already been passed, but those Clear Points go up up up as you play, meaning you’re going to have to figure out how to regularly pull off scores of 11,000 or more just to advance. The only reason the Clear Point was just 6,400 in the round shown in that video, too, is because of the occasional between-round bonus chance you get. Here, a flashing light moves from tile to tile on a bonus grid, and you select when you’re feeling lucky. Inside is not a point bonus to for your score, but a potential score reduction for your next Clear Point, which can be as low as 400 points or something mid-range like 2,000, or almost an entire round’s worth of points if you’re exceptionally lucky, basically making it a freebie for you.

You might need all the luck you can get to complete Ryukyu: there are only a couple of confirmed clears of the game on a single credit, ever, and the first one took 30 years, with the second of these performed by the person Hamster brought in to play test the Arcade Archives release. The final Clear Point score is 18,000, which is A Lot of points, as anyone who has suddenly struggled to get half as much in a round where the cards just aren’t coming like you had planned for them to could tell you. You can watch the entire thing play out, if you’d like, either embedded below or on the YouTube channel of the person with the first confirmed clear: it took over two hours, a lot of skill, and just as much luck for it to happen.

Don’t let that any of that intimidate you, however. Ryukyu is exceptional, whether you can clear it or not. It’s easy enough to pick up and play, as poker and solitaire should be, but you need to understand odds and master both efficiency and point scoring in order to progress deeply into the game. This is one, like poker and solitaire themselves, that I’ll be coming back to for years. And like those games, sometimes you’ve got the cards, and sometimes you don’t, but the only way to win is to play, play, and play.

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