Spider Solitaire: rules and free online play

Goal of the game

In the end, all 104 cards should be gone from the table in eight complete runs. A complete run goes from king down to ace in one suit: King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9 … 2, Ace – all spades, for example. The king is the highest card, the ace the lowest.

Unlike Solitaire (Klondike) or FreeCell, there are no foundations you play cards to one by one: a run only leaves the table as a whole, once it’s complete in a column. You get there by rearranging the ten columns, uncovering face-down cards and, when nothing else works, dealing new cards from the stock.

Setup: ten columns and the stock

Spider is played with two decks – 104 cards, no jokers. They’re dealt into ten columns: the first four get 6 cards each, the other six get 5 – 54 cards in all. Only the top card of each column is face up; the rest are face down.

The remaining 50 cards form the face-down stock at the top left – enough for five deals of ten cards. Finished runs go onto their own pile, so you can always see how many you’ve done. At Tavern Jack the game shuffles and deals for you.

Difficulty: 1, 2 or 4 suits

In Spider, the number of suits sets the difficulty. At Tavern Jack you choose it for free games on the start screen; the default is 1 suit, and the Daily Spider always uses one suit too.

There are always 104 cards and eight runs – only the number of suits they’re split across changes:

• 1 suit: spades only – eight runs of spades. Easy and the default, great for getting started.
• 2 suits: spades and hearts – four runs each. Tricky, because mixed runs get in the way more often.
• 4 suits: spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds – two runs each. Properly hard; every move counts.

Building: down by one, any suit

In the columns you build down, always exactly one lower: a 7 on an 8, then a 6 and so on. The suit doesn’t matter here – the 6 of Hearts can go on the 7 of Spades.

The king is the highest card: it fits on nothing and can only go into an empty column. The ace is the lowest – nothing can be placed on an ace.

An empty column is valuable: any card can go there, not just a king – and so can a whole run in one suit. The only thing you can’t do is move an entire column into an empty one; it wouldn’t achieve anything. At Tavern Jack you tap a card and it jumps to the best spot – or you drag it where you want it.

Moving runs: one suit only

This is the key to Spider: you can build on any suit, but only runs in one suit move together. If the 9, 8 and 7 of Spades lie on top of each other in unbroken order, you can move all three at once – or just the 8 and 7, or only the 7.

There’s no limit on length: unlike FreeCell, where free cells and empty columns decide how many cards you can move, a run in one suit always moves as a whole – even from king to ace.

If a run is mixed – say 9 of Spades, 8 of Hearts, 7 of Spades – you can only move the top part that’s in one suit, here just the 7 of Spades. The 8 of Hearts comes free once the 7 is gone. Mixed runs are handy for parking cards but often get in the way later. With 1 suit this never happens – every card is a spade.

When a column has no face-up card left, the top face-down card turns over by itself.

Completed runs: king to ace in one suit

As soon as a complete run from king to ace in one suit lies face up at the top of a column, it leaves the table by itself – worth 100 points. If that leaves the column without a face-up card, the next face-down card turns over.

The run must be unbroken, in one suit and at the top of the column: King, Queen, Jack, 10 … 2, Ace. If a card of another suit is stuck in the middle, it doesn’t count – you’ll have to rearrange first. You never clear a run by hand; it always happens automatically.

Dealing from the stock

When there’s nothing useful left to do in the columns, tap the stock: it deals one card face up onto each of the ten columns. You can do this five times, then the stock is empty. Each deal counts as a move.

Tavern Jack uses the classic rule: you can only deal when no column is empty. If you have an empty column, fill it with a card or a run first. The new cards also land on top of your tidy runs – so it pays to get as much in order as you can before dealing.

End and scoring

You win when all eight runs are complete. You can undo up to 200 steps back, and “Hint” suggests a sensible move: completing a run, uncovering a face-down card or building a run in one suit – and if none of that works, dealing from the stock. If you’re stuck, you can give up – your points so far then count. Scoring uses no clock and is based on classic Windows Spider:

• Start: 500 points
• Every move: −1 point – dealing and undoing included
• Every completed run: +100 points
• Undo the move that completed a run, and its 100 points go too.
• Your score never drops below 0.
• So the best possible score is 1,300 points minus your number of moves – the fewer moves, the more points.

Daily Spider: the same deal for everyone, every day

In the Daily Spider everyone gets the same deal on the same day – always with one suit – so you can compare yourself directly with your friends. Unlike the Daily Solitaire, the deal isn’t checked by a solver beforehand, but with one suit most deals can be won with good play.

Your first attempt of the day counts for the daily leaderboard. Every move is replayed on the server, so there’s no cheating. You can share your result spoiler-free – with your points, completed runs, number of moves and how often you undid something.

History and variants

Spider is one of the best-known two-deck patience games. Microsoft made it famous: Spider Solitaire came out in 1998 in the Plus! 98 add-on pack and was later included with Windows ME and Windows XP. Many people know the 1, 2 and 4 suit levels from there.

Related games: Spiderette is Spider with a single deck, laid out in seven columns like Klondike. In Scorpion you also build by suit with one deck, but you can move any face-up card together with everything on top of it.

Spider itself is played in different ways too: some versions let you deal even with empty columns, others score differently or play against the clock. At Tavern Jack you play by the classic rule – dealing only with no empty column – with Windows-style scoring without a clock, same-suit runs of any length and completed runs cleared automatically.