About MSO Games

Who's behind this

Hi — I'm Erik, the solo developer behind MSO Games. I started this project because I love playing FreeCell and I wanted this game to exist. I spent a long time trying to get other developers to understand the experience I had in mind — competitive, deep, ad-free, with real visibility into how you actually played — and eventually realized that if it was going to exist at all, I was going to have to build it myself.

Ads in games are something I feel strongly about. They destroy the flow and the enjoyment of a game — the whole point of a coffee-break round is the coffee-break feeling, and you can't have that when a video ad is shouting at you between hands. So there are none in MSO Games today — and if that ever has to change, you'll hear it from me here first, plainly and ahead of time.

My professional background is in Business Intelligence, which is where the analytics depth of MSO Games comes from — per-deal leaderboards, skill radar charts, game playback, percentiles, the works. Showing players how they actually performed, against a comparison set that means something, is the part of this project that genuinely excites me. Most card games have stat screens that exist; very few have stat screens that say anything useful.

Development happens on Linux, with cross-platform builds for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. The Linux build isn't an afterthought — it's the build I run every day.

What we ship

• MSO FreeCell Arena — Competitive FreeCell with shared deals, per-deal leaderboards, playback of the top finishers’ games, group lobbies, daily challenges, and four difficulty bands, each playable in Casual or Hardcore — and when Hardcore kills you, the Afterlife hands the board back at the move before your fatal one so you can play on and see what went wrong.
• MSO Minesweeper Arena — The same competitive model applied to Minesweeper: shared seeds, leaderboards, game playback, group lobbies, and no-guess boards at every difficulty — every board is logically solvable.

Both games run natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux (Electron; code-signed on Windows and macOS). FreeCell is released on Google Play (Android) and the App Store (iPhone and iPad); Minesweeper on mobile is next on the list. See the roadmap for what's shipped and what's coming.

Trust & verification

Windows and macOS builds are code-signed and OS-verified — Azure Trusted Signing on Windows (Authenticode/SmartScreen), Apple Developer ID with notarization on macOS (Gatekeeper) — and your operating system will refuse to run, or warn loudly, if those signatures fail. Linux has no standard equivalent for AppImages, so every release ships a SHA256SUMS file alongside its downloads (FreeCell, Minesweeper): save it next to the file you downloaded and run sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing. The same file lists the Windows and macOS installers too, if you would rather check for yourself. Mobile builds are distributed through Google Play and Apple's App Store with their own signing requirements.

How we run things

MSO Games runs as close to the inverse of the modern free-to-play playbook as we can:

• No ads. Not banner ads, not interstitials, not rewarded ads, not "watch this video to skip a turn."
• No behavioral tracking. No Google Analytics, no Firebase Analytics, no Mixpanel, no behavioral SDKs in the apps. The website counts its visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics — cookieless, no fingerprinting, no following you to other sites — and that is the whole of it.
• No data sold. Your data is yours. See the Privacy Policy for the full details.
• No microtransactions. No cosmetics for sale, no coin packs, no "remove the timer for $0.99."
• No engagement-bait notifications. We celebrate when you show up — daily challenge streaks, milestones, badges — but we won't hassle you when you don't. No "your streak is at risk!" push pings, no "we miss you" emails, no guilt-trip design.

The game is free to download and play on every platform. What the subscription pays for is the service: the online side that needs a server behind it — leaderboards, rivalries, group hosting, your games recorded and kept to watch back — plus Hardcore, the one mode we keep for the full game. That's a low flat subscription — and where a store can't bill monthly, Steam included, the same service comes as a single annual price instead. None of it is switched on yet: while we're in beta the online side is free for everyone. All of this is how it works today. If any of it changes, we'll say so here, plainly and ahead of time.

Contact

• Privacy questions / data requests: [email protected]
• General support / feedback: [email protected]
• Community Discord: discord.gg/RfFXHmfQmW
• Privacy Policy: msogames.com/privacy
• Roadmap: msogames.com/roadmap