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Spider Solitaire

Build King down to Ace in one suit — then clear it off the board.

About Spider Solitaire

Spider Solitaire is the two-deck patience game that turned a lot of casual card players into serious ones. Where Klondike asks you to build four neat foundations, Spider hands you 104 cards in ten columns and one demand: build a complete King-down-to-Ace run in a single suit, and it leaves the table. Do that eight times and you have won. The game dates back to at least the 1940s — Franklin D. Roosevelt was famously fond of it — and it became a household name when it shipped with Windows (see Spider solitaire on Wikipedia).

This is PlayZone's own build, written in-house and running entirely in your browser with no download and no account. You choose the difficulty by choosing how many suits are in play: 1 Suit is the friendliest version and the right place to start, 2 Suits is the classic middle ground, and 4 Suits is the full challenge that even strong players lose regularly. Play is tap-to-pick-up and tap-to-drop — no fiddly dragging, which matters when ten columns have to share a phone screen. Undo steps back through your last sixty moves, scoring follows the traditional rules (start at 500, minus one per move, plus 100 per completed sequence), and your best score for each difficulty is saved on your device.

How to Play Spider Solitaire

Ten columns are dealt 54 cards; the four left-hand columns get six each and the rest get five, with the bottom card of every column face up. The remaining 50 cards sit in the stock as five deals of ten.

Tap a face-up card to pick it up, then tap the column you want it to go to. A card can land on any card exactly one rank higher — regardless of suit — or on an empty column. You can move several cards at once, but only if they form a descending run in the same suit: the 9-8-7 of spades travels together, a mixed 9-8-7 does not. Whenever you uncover a face-down card it flips automatically. When a full King-to-Ace run in one suit forms at the bottom of a column, it clears itself off the board and counts toward your eight. Tap the stock pile to deal a fresh row across all ten columns — but you cannot deal while any column is empty, so plan for that.

Strategy: How Good Players Win

  1. Empty a column early, and guard it. An empty column is the most powerful thing on the board — it is a parking space for any card and the only way to reorganise mixed-suit piles. Getting one before you exhaust the stock is often the whole game.
  2. Prefer same-suit builds even when off-suit is legal. Dropping a red 7 on a black 8 is allowed and sometimes necessary, but it creates a joint you will have to break later. Every same-suit join is progress; every off-suit join is a debt.
  3. Dig out face-down cards first. Hidden cards are the real obstacle, not the visible mess. Between two equally legal moves, take the one that exposes a face-down card — information now beats tidiness later.
  4. Do not deal from the stock while you still have moves. Each deal drops a card on every column, burying whatever you were building. Squeeze the board dry first; the stock is a last resort, not a rhythm.
  5. Use Undo as a thinking tool. Spider rewards trying a line to see where it dead-ends. Play the sequence, look at the result, and undo it if it stalls. That is exploration, not cheating.
  6. Start on 1 Suit and stay there until you win comfortably. The suit count is not a cosmetic setting — 4-suit Spider is a genuinely hard game with a low win rate even for experts. Build the habits on 1 Suit first.

A Longer, Slower Kind of Puzzle

Spider is the patient sibling of our Klondike Solitaire: bigger board, longer games, and far more planning per move. If you enjoy the tile-excavation rhythm of Mahjong Solitaire — clearing what blocks the most, in the right order — Spider scratches exactly that itch with playing cards. It is unhurried by design, with no clock and no penalty for thinking, which makes it a favourite of the same audience I wrote my free memory games for seniors guide for.

Further Reading

FAQ

How do I move cards?

Tap a face-up card to pick it up — it and every card below it lift together if they form a same-suit descending run — then tap the destination column. Tap the same card again to cancel, or press Escape. There is no dragging, so it works identically on phones and desktops.

Which cards can I move together?

Only a run that descends by one and shares a suit: the 10-9-8 of hearts moves as a block. A mixed-suit 10-9-8 does not — you would have to move those cards one at a time, and only onto a card one rank higher.

Why won't the stock deal?

Because a column is empty. Spider's rules forbid dealing a new row while any column is bare, so fill it first. The pips beside the board show how many of the five deals you have left.

What's the difference between 1, 2, and 4 suits?

How many suits the 104 cards are drawn from. One suit means every card can join any other run, which makes it a friendly, usually winnable game. Two suits doubles the sorting work. Four suits is the classic hard version where even experienced players lose more than they win — start low and work up.

How does scoring work?

Traditional Spider scoring: you begin at 500, lose one point per move, and gain 100 for each completed King-to-Ace sequence. Finishing quickly and cleanly scores higher, and your best score is stored separately for each suit count.

Can I undo a mistake?

Yes — the Undo button steps back through your recent moves (Ctrl+Z works too), including stock deals. Undo is part of the strategy in Spider: trying a line and reversing it is how you find the one that works.

Can I really play this on a phone?

Yes. Ten columns is a lot for a portrait screen, so this build is designed for it: tap-to-move instead of dragging, large corner ranks, and a layout that scales to the width available. 1 Suit is the default partly because it is the most comfortable to read on a small screen.