Grey Alien Games is the definition of an outsider game developer. A husband-and-wife team based in rural Dorset, Jake Birkett and Helen Carmichael work alone with support from tiny publishers and overseas contractors. Jake isn't a refugee from AAA development, but a veteran of the unfashionable PC casual gaming scene of the last decade, when he churned out cheerful puzzle games for sites like Big Fish. They are also history nuts. Helen, who writes the scenarios, is a historian, while Jake collects coins. When making a game set in historical times, Jake likes to keep a coin from the period on his desk to turn over in his hand while he works. If you had to place them as characters in a contemporary sitcom, it would be The Detectorists, not Silicon Valley.

We should treasure developers like this, who work out of the loop and follow their own passions, because their games are like nothing else. Grey Alien had a minor hit a couple of years ago with Regency Solitaire, a relaxing, immaculate puzzle game that danced elegantly around a light-hearted pastiche of the novels of Jane Austen. I loved it. When they ported it from Big Fish to Steam, it found an unexpected audience there, and Grey Alien were persuaded to make something along the same lines but aimed more squarely at Steam's core gaming crowd.

The result is Shadowhand, which aims to blend the noble pastime of solitaire with the structure and systems of a role-playing game - rather like Puzzle Quest did for match-three puzzle games. It's definitely a more sophisticated game than Regency Solitaire, adding loot, equipment, character attributes and consumable items to the earlier game's arcade-style combos and recharging skills. It also introduces the wonderfully paradoxical concept of turn-based combat solitaire, which is where its RPG systems find purchase and it offers some tactical depth.

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How can you not be desperate to play this: a game which blends the casual satisfaction of clicking cards away in a game of solitaire with a tactical turn-based RPG and a story about an 18th-century highwaywoman. Oh, and it's by the developers of the wonderful Jane Austen-themed puzzle game, Regency Solitaire.

The game is Shadowhand, it finally has a release date, and it's blessedly soon: 7th December. It will launch on that date for Windows and Mac on Steam, GOG, the Humble Store and direct from the publisher Positech.

If you're wondering why I sound so excited: well, I'm a solitaire obsessive and collector of its weird video game variants, and this sounds like the spiciest solitaire mash-up since Pocket Card Jockey on 3DS blended the card game with a surprisingly high-energy take on horse-racing. As such, I've been following Shadowhand for a what feels like a long time. I saw a convincing demo early last year and at that point we were expecting it last summer. Earlier this week, I asked the designer and programmer Jake Birkett what had taken so long over email and he said, "I should have known that combining a turn-based RPG with solitaire would take ages!"

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