Many will be familiar with Chess Life’s Solitaire Chess column by Bruce Pandolfini. Solitaire Chess has been running for decades, and, because Chess Life has made its archive of past issues available online, it’s possible to play through dozens of solitaire games. Recently, it struck me that it would be great to have a searchable database of Solitaire Chess games, which one might use to find games in particular openings or featuring favorite players, for example. For that reason, I’ve started looking back through old issues of Chess Life and recording information about the games that have been featured. Note that the spreadsheet below includes the game IDs for chessgames.com; games there are sometimes annotated. Just enter the game ID into chessgames.com’s search field.

Of course, Pandolfini also wrote a Solitaire Chess book that may be out of print; there’s another by I.A. Horowitz, as well, that appears to be very affordable. But if you have a subscription to Chess Life, you can access Pandolfini’s columns for free.