Spider Solitaire
Spider spreads ten columns across the table and asks for eight complete King-to-Ace runs in a single suit. Choose one suit for a gentle, almost meditative game, two for a real fight, or all four when you want the hardest solitaire in the pack. The trick is that the stock refuses to deal at all while any column stands empty, so an empty column is both the only way to take a bad pile apart and the one thing stopping you dealing. Boxless gives you unlimited undo to find that out the hard way.
- Players
- 1
- Playing time
- 20 min
- Ages
- 10 to adult
- Suits
- 1, 2 or 4
How it's played
Ten columns, two decks, and eight complete King-to-Ace runs to build. Spider looks like Klondike with more of everything. It is not — it has one rule Klondike does not, and that rule is the entire game.
Rank only
A seven of diamonds goes onto an eight of spades without complaint. Suit is never tested on the way down — anything one rank lower fits.
Rank and suit
But the two of them will not move together, ever. A run only lifts if it is all one suit. The seven can leave on its own; the pair cannot.
That asymmetry is the whole of Spider. You are always being offered a move that is legal now and expensive later, and the game will never stop you making it.
The suit count is that same rule with a number in it
It is not a cosmetic setting. The deck is genuinely rebuilt: a hundred and four cards either way, but with fewer suits there are more copies of each, and a card that fits by rank is far likelier to be one you can also carry.
suit
- Copies of each
- 8
- A card that fits also lifts
- always
suits
- Copies of each
- 4
- A card that fits also lifts
- 1 in 2
suits
- Copies of each
- 2
- A card that fits also lifts
- 1 in 4
What is on the table before you start
cards — two decks, however many suits
columns, four of six cards and six of five
of the fifty-four dealt are face down
held in the stock, in five deals of ten
Fifty-four dealt and fifty held back, and only ten cards are showing. Spider starts more hidden than it looks — and unlike Klondike, nothing turns over because you emptied a pile onto the foundations. There are no foundations.
A column you built, and cannot unbuild.
Here is an ordinary column, eight cards, every one of them placed legally. Descending all the way. It looks tidy.
Two of those cards can be moved. That is the whole column's worth of options.
The three hearts in the middle are a real run — eight, seven, six, all the same suit. They still cannot move, because a run only lifts if it runs unbroken to the top of the column, and there are two spades sitting on it.
An empty column is the only tool that fixes this: anything can go there, so it is where you dismantle a pile one card at a time. It is also the most expensive thing on the board to make.
Eight runs, and a stock that can refuse you
A King down to an Ace in one suit, in one column, disappears the moment it is complete. Do that eight times — a hundred and four cards, the whole table — and the game is won.
Eight runs, King to Ace
Each one leaves the table by itself the instant it is finished. Eight times thirteen is the whole hundred and four — there is nothing else to clear.
Ten at a time, five times
One card onto every column at once, face up, whether it helps or not. Fifty cards, five deals, and no way to take one back.
It will not deal onto a gap
Leave a column empty and the stock simply will not go. Fill it first — with anything — or you are not dealing at all.
Which sets up the cruellest bit of arithmetic in the game: an empty column is your only way of taking a bad pile apart, and holding one is also the one thing that stops you dealing. You cannot save it and spend it.
If the room liked this
Classic Klondike Solitaire - host plays while others watch in real-time!
Nothing is face down and almost every deal can be won. Four free cells hold cards aside while you unstack eight columns.
Pair up cards that add to 13 to demolish a seven-row pyramid. The order you pair in is the whole game.