Spider

What is Spider Solitaire?

One of the most popular patience games, and one of the hardest. Klondike uses a single deck; Spider uses two full decks, 104 cards, dealt across ten tableau columns. The name comes from a spider's eight legs, which is also how many completed sequences you need to win.

A brief history

Spider was first written up in 1947, in a book called "Games of Patience", but hardly anyone outside card circles played it until Microsoft bundled it with Windows ME in 2000. After that it went everywhere, and it has rivalled Klondike for daily play time ever since.

Core strategy

Keep your sequences in-suit wherever you can. The rules let you put any card on any card one rank higher, and it's tempting, but a mixed-suit sequence can't be moved as a group. What you've actually built is a block that sits there clogging the column. Build same-suit runs, and clear columns so you have room to reorganise.

Empty columns are worth a great deal. They're temporary storage while you rearrange things elsewhere, and each one roughly doubles how freely you can move cards. Clear one early if you can, and think hard before you fill it back in.

One deal a day

One new shuffle a day, generated from a seed, so everyone who visits that day faces the same arrangement. Your first game against it is the one that counts toward your streak and records. Once that's done the play button just keeps dealing: fresh random shuffles, as many as you want, none of them touching your statistics.

Tips for beginners

Go after the columns with the fewest face-down cards first, since those are the easiest to clear. Don't deal from the stock until you've genuinely run out of useful moves in the tableau, because a deal you didn't need can bury a column you were about to open. When two moves both look fine, take the one that builds a longer same-suit run or turns over a face-down card. And give it time. A Spider game runs 10 to 20 minutes.

How scoring works

Every completed King-to-Ace run banks one hundred points, so a finished deal is worth eight hundred. Hints are unlimited and each one shown costs a single point — nothing you'd ever notice mid-game, but when two players clear the same number of suits, the one who did it unaided ranks first. Your time and move count are recorded alongside for your own records.

Spider Solitaire 2 suits: which variant this is

This is the 2 suits game, played with hearts and spades across two decks. The 1 suit version, all spades, is the gentle one most people learn on, and 4 suits is the brutal one. Two suits sits in between on purpose: hard enough that a careless deal from the stock will cost you the game, forgiving enough that a well-played deal usually goes in.

If you've played the 4 suits game and bounced off it, this is the one to come back to. Every rule is identical — build King down to Ace, lift a completed run off the board, deal ten more cards when you're stuck. Only the number of suits changes, and it changes almost everything about how the deal plays.

Both other versions are here to practise against, unlimited and unrecorded: Spider Solitaire 1 suit if you're learning the shape of the game, 4 suits if two has stopped being interesting. Only the 2 suits deal above is solver-checked and only it counts toward your streak.