Spider Solitaire

Eight runs to build

How to play Spider Solitaire

Fifty-four cards go into ten columns — four columns of six and six of five — with only the bottom card of each turned up. That leaves forty-four hidden and fifty waiting in the stock.

There are no foundations. Instead you build downward inside the tableau itself, and when a column contains a complete run from king all the way down to ace, that run lifts off the board and is gone. Eight runs clears the deck and wins the game.

On this page every card is the same suit, which means any descending sequence is automatically a movable one. That is the beginner's version of Spider and it is genuinely a different game from the four-suit original — the table further down explains how much.

Suit runs and part-runs

Which Spider moves are legal

The forced deal

The stock does not ask permission

Spider's stock works nothing like Klondike's. You do not draw a card and decide what to do with it. You press deal, and one card lands face up on top of every single column at once — ten cards, all placed for you, including on top of the run you spent twenty moves assembling.

There are five of these deals and no way to skip one, recycle them, or take a partial row. Each one is a small controlled demolition of your board, and the whole skill of Spider is arranging things so the damage lands where you can repair it.

Suits and spaces

Spider strategy

Uncovering face-down cards is worth more than tidiness, the same as Klondike, but Spider adds a wrinkle: a long ordered run is not progress on its own. Only a complete king-to-ace run scores, so a beautiful 9-through-4 sequence sitting on a face-down card has achieved nothing except making that card harder to reach.

Work from the kings down. A king can never be moved onto anything, so a king sitting on top of a column is dead weight until a space appears — but a king at the bottom of a column is the anchor an entire run can be built on. Where your kings are tells you which columns are worth developing and which are write-offs.

Time the deals rather than taking them when you are stuck. The best moment to deal is when the board has loose low cards and at least one column short enough to absorb a bad landing. The worst is when everything is finally in order, because that is exactly what the deal will break.

And be careful which card you build on. In one-suit Spider every 8 accepts every 7, so the move is always legal — the real decision is which 8 you are willing to bury, and whether you will ever get it back.

Where deals go wrong

Where Spider deals go wrong

Emptying a column right before you need the stock

An empty column is the most valuable thing on a Spider board — until the stock will not deal because of it. If you are close to needing a fresh row, fill the space first, even with a card you would rather not place.

Building down across the wrong card

Placing a 6 on a 7 that sits at the bottom of a long column feels productive and buries the 7 permanently. In one-suit Spider every 7 accepts every 6, so the question is never whether the move is legal but which 7 you are burying.

Spending the last deal on a tidy board

The fifth deal drops ten cards onto whatever you have built, and it will break runs. Take it while you still have loose cards and spare space to absorb it, not once everything is finally in order.

The difficulty dial

One suit, two suits, four suits

Spider's difficulty comes almost entirely from how many suits are in the deck, because suits decide whether an ordered run can actually move.

This page offers one suit only. That is a deliberate choice rather than an omission: one-suit Spider is a genuinely good game in its own right and by far the best way to learn the stock timing, which is the part that transfers to the harder versions.

Spider's real difficulty

Is Spider Solitaire winnable?

One-suit Spider is winnable far more often than not, and most losses come from stock timing rather than from a bad shuffle. Because runs clear automatically and every sequence is movable, a careful player who keeps a column open until just before each deal will finish a large majority of hands.

We do not publish a figure. Any honest number would have to be measured against this exact version — one suit, five deals, unlimited undo — and quoting a four-suit win rate here, which is dramatically lower, would be actively misleading.

The run-builders

Spider against the other run builders

If the two-deck length is the off-putting part rather than the rules, Spiderette is the same game on one deck and seven columns, and finishes in a fraction of the time.