How to play

Spider is played with two decks — 104 cards. Fifty-four of them are dealt into ten columns, only the top card of each face up; the other fifty wait in the stock, top right. Your job is to build eight runs from king down to ace, each in a single suit. The moment a run is complete it leaves the table on its own, and the game is won when all eight have gone.

Any card can land on a card one rank higher, whatever the suit — but only cards of the same suit move together as a group. That difference is the whole game: a red seven parked on a black eight is stored, while a seven on an eight of its own suit is progress. An empty column takes anything, and every time you lift the last face-up card off a pile, the card underneath turns over.

When you run out of ideas, click the stock to deal a fresh card onto every column — ten at once, covering whatever you left unfinished. The rules will not let you deal while a column is empty, so fill your holes first. Fewer suits make a gentler game: at one suit everything matches everything, at four the full classic is waiting.

Controls

• Drag — carry a card or a same-suit run to another column
• Click — pick a run up; click a destination to drop it
• Click twice — send the run to the best place the rules allow, its own suit first
• Space or D — deal the next row from the stock
• Z or U — undo (as far back as you like)
• R — restart this game
• N — a new random game
• Esc — put the picked-up run down

Strategy tips

• Turn cards over before anything else. A move that exposes a face-down card is almost always better than one that does not — the cards you cannot see are the only thing standing between you and the win.
• Build in suit when you can. An off-suit landing stores a card; a same-suit landing makes a run that can travel. Given the choice, always join like to like, and use off-suit moves to dig rather than to tidy.
• Empty a column and keep it empty. A free column is the strongest tool on the table — a workbench for turning awkward piles into ordered ones. Spending it is fine; spending it without a plan is how games die.
• Deal as late as you can. Every deal buries all ten piles under a fresh layer. Squeeze the position dry first, and leave your columns tidy enough to absorb the blow.
• Kings need somewhere to live. Nothing sits on a king, so one dealt onto a messy pile blocks it until you find it an empty column. Plan around them early.
• There is a way through. Every game here was finished by a solver before it was offered to you, so a dead end is a wrong turn rather than a bad deal. Undo back to the last card you turned over and take the other branch.

About Spider

Spider dates from the 1940s and takes its name from the eight runs you build — one for each of a spider's legs. Like Klondike it became a household name when Microsoft shipped it with Windows, and among solitaires it is the long game: a deal can absorb you for twenty minutes, and the four-suit version is one of the hardest card games you can play alone.

The suit count is the difficulty dial. At one suit every card matches every other and the game is about order; at two suits half your moves are storage; at four suits every off-suit landing is a small debt that comes due. Each count keeps its own game numbers, records and bank of deals.

Most Spider deals you meet elsewhere are simply dealt, and plenty of them cannot be won no matter how well you play. Not these. Every game in this collection was handed to a solver that can see the face-down cards, and only the ones it actually finished are here — with the winning line played back through the same rules you are bound by, as proof. Lose one and it was a mistake, not a bad deal. Undo is unlimited, so a line that dead-ends costs you nothing but the time.