Spider
Also known as Spider Solitaire, Spider Patience
- Players
- 1 player
- Deck
- 2 standard decks (104 cards); the easier settings replace the pack with repeated copies of one or two suits
- Time
- 20-45 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Solitaire (1 player)
Setup
Spider is played with 104 cards, the equivalent of two standard decks. Which suits those cards come from is the difficulty setting. The four-suit game uses two full decks, two of each suit. The two-suit game uses four copies each of two suits, usually spades and hearts. The one-suit game uses eight copies of a single suit. With real cards you are effectively playing four-suit unless you go to the trouble of assembling a stripped pack, which is why the easier settings are mainly a computer thing.
Shuffle all 104 cards together and deal 54 of them into ten tableau columns: six cards each to the first four columns and five cards each to the remaining six. Deal them face down, then turn the exposed card of each column face up. The 50 cards left over become the stock, set aside face down. It will feed the tableau in five deals of ten.
There are no foundation piles to build on. Just leave a clear area beside the tableau for completed sequences, which come off the table intact. You will need room for eight of them.
Play
Everything happens in the tableau. Build columns downward by rank, and by rank alone: any 9 may be placed on any 10 whatever the suits. Aces are low and kings are high, so nothing can ever be placed on an ace, and a king can never be placed on another card.
Suit matters for moving, not for placing. You may always move the single exposed card at the end of a column. You may move several cards as a block only if they sit at the end of a column in unbroken descending rank order, one rank at a time with no gaps, and are all of the same suit. The 8, 7 and 6 of clubs travel together; a stack of club 8, heart 7, club 6 is a perfectly legal arrangement on the table but has to be taken apart one card at a time. Where the block lands is governed by rank only, exactly as for a single card: that run of clubs will go onto any 9 at all, or into an empty column. So the suit rule constrains what you can pick up, never what you can put it on. That single restriction is what makes the multi-suit games hard, and it is the rule newcomers most often get wrong.
When a move uncovers a face-down card at the end of a column, turn it face up at once.
An empty column will accept any card, or any block you are allowed to move. Nothing is reserved for kings. Putting a king there is usually the strongest use of the space, though, since a column headed by a low card can only ever take a few more cards on top.
When you have no move worth making, deal from the stock: one card face up onto the end of every one of the ten columns, all at once. Dealing is never forced and never has to wait for the tableau to dry up, so you may take a deal whenever you judge the position is as good as it is going to get. You may do this five times, which exactly exhausts the 50-card stock. There is one hard condition attached. Every column must contain at least one card before you deal. If any column is empty you cannot deal, and you have to fill it first, even with a single junk card. Players regularly lose games by clearing a column and then discovering they have locked themselves out of the stock, so plan the deal before you empty anything. Note also that a deal drops a card onto every column whether it helps or not, so it will usually bury runs you were part way through assembling.
Whenever a full descending same-suit sequence from king down to ace sits at the end of a column, it is removed from the table and set aside. That sequence is finished and can never be touched again. Removing it exposes whatever was underneath, which is very often the real reason you built it. Where removal is offered as a choice rather than done for you, there is never a reason to decline, since nothing can be built on an ace anyway.
You win the moment the eighth sequence comes off. You lose when the stock is exhausted and no legal move remains, though in practice a game is over well before that, as soon as the cards you still need are buried under a card of lower rank in every column that could reach them. Shuffling, undoing a deal, or restarting is not part of the rules; the deal you were given is the deal you play.
Goal & scoring
You win by assembling and removing all eight complete king-to-ace sequences, each one entirely in a single suit, which clears every card off the table. Anything short of eight is a loss; there is no partial credit in casual play.
Where software keeps score, the usual arrangement hands you 500 at the outset and then erodes it as you work: every action costs a single point, and that includes taking a deal from the stock as well as reversing yourself with undo. Running the other way is a credit of 100 for each suit sequence sent off the table. Add all eight credits to an untouched opening balance and the ceiling comes to 1,300, a figure nobody meets, because the hundreds of moves a genuine game demands have eaten into the balance long before the last sequence forms.
Not every deal can be won, and the suit setting changes the odds enormously. One-suit is winnable nearly every time with careful play, at ninety-five percent and upwards. Two-suit is kinder than its reputation: an unpractised player takes about one deal in three, and skilled play is put well above half. Four-suit, the serious version, is reckoned at around one deal in three for a skilled player as well, on a figure that traces back to Morehead and Mott-Smith; a rate of one in ten also circulates for it and is treated with suspicion by people who play the game often. Take all of these as estimates. They rest on expert judgement rather than on the exhaustive solver work FreeCell has had, and accounts differ over whether any thorough software study of Spider's solvability exists at all.
Variants
Spiderette — One deck, Klondike-shaped. Deal 28 cards into seven columns of one through seven, exposed card face up, and keep the other 24 as stock. Building, group movement and sequence removal follow Spider exactly, but you only need four king-to-ace suit sequences. The stock is dealt seven at a time, one card onto each column, and the last deal is short: three cards, going to the leftmost columns.
Will o' the Wisp — A faster one-deck Spider. Deal seven columns of three cards each, 21 in total, with only the exposed card of each column face up. The remaining 31 cards feed the tableau one card per column: four full deals of seven, then a final short deal of three that goes to the three leftmost columns. Everything else matches Spider, and four suit sequences win it. The shallow columns mean far less is hidden at the start, which makes it markedly kinder than Spiderette.
Black Widow — Spider with the group-move restriction dropped. Same two decks, same 54-card deal into ten columns and same five deals of ten from the stock, but any run in descending rank order may be picked up and moved as a block whatever its suits. Removal still demands a full king-to-ace sequence in one suit, so the goal is unchanged. Lifting the restriction that makes four-suit Spider punishing leaves a game far easier than four-suit but still harder than one-suit Spider, since you must eventually sort the suits out to score. Some sources instead use the name Black Widow for plain one-suit Spider, so check which is meant before you sit down.
Simple Simon — One deck, no stock, nothing hidden. All 52 cards go face up into ten columns of eight, eight, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and one. Build down by rank ignoring suit, move blocks only when they are same-suit descending runs, and put any card into an empty column. Remove the four king-to-ace suit sequences to win. With no stock and full information it is a pure puzzle rather than a game of chance.
Rules checked against Wikipedia, Solitaire Laboratory, Semicolon Solitaire Rules, Solitaired, BVS Solitaire, SuitedGames, TrySolitaire, Solitaire Bliss.