How to play Spider Solitaire

Spider Solitaire is the most-played patience game in the world, rebuilt for the browser in full. Two decks, ten columns, and one rule that drives everything: a run of cards must descend by one and stay in a single suit. Clear a full king-to-ace run of thirteen cards and it moves off the board. Clear every suit and the deal is yours. One, two or four suits, unlimited undo, and no download at all.

Steps

1. Ten columns are dealt face up except for the last card of each. The rest of both decks sits face down in the stock at the top left.
2. Click any face-up card to pick it up. You may also pick up several face-up cards below it, as long as they already form a descending same-suit run.
3. Drop the run on a card exactly one rank higher — a five goes on a six. In four-suit mode the suits must match too; in one- and two-suit mode any suit works.
4. Only fully revealed cards move. Every time you empty a column, the card underneath flips face up automatically.
5. When you complete thirteen cards in a single descending same-suit run, king down to ace, the run is taken off the board and moves to the finished pile at the top right.
6. Click the stock to deal a new card onto every column. The stock only ever hands out cards, never takes them back, so once it is empty every move has to come from the board itself.
7. One-suit is a gentle introduction, two suits is the classic game, and four suits is the hard one. Clear all suits to win.

Tips that actually help

• Work the empty columns first. An empty column is the only piece of space you can create, and you cannot make one without emptying another.
• Prefer moves that reveal a face-down card over moves that just tidy the board. Uncovered information is worth more than neat piles.
• A run you can move as one unit is worth far more than the same cards played one at a time. Always check for a movable run before picking a single card.
• Never break a run of thirteen that is already complete. If the tail of a column reads king to ace in one suit, let collect take it instead of moving it by hand.
• In four-suit mode, be strict about the suit. Two moves of the same rank and direction will save you far more moves than a sloppy shortcut ever will.
• You have unlimited undo, up to sixty steps. When a plan falls apart, step back rather than digging deeper.

What is Spider Solitaire?

Spider Solitaire is the patience game the rest of the genre is measured against. It was invented in the 1990s and is now consistently reported as the most-played solitaire on earth, ahead of Klondike by a wide margin. The layout is a grid of ten columns dealt from two full decks; the cards that do not fit go into a stock you can redeal from.

What makes Spider different from every other patience game is that it barely uses suits. In the classic four-suit version they exist, but they are never compared to each other — only a descending sequence in a single suit counts. That single constraint turns the game into a sorting problem with a timer you built yourself, because every move either brings two piles closer to a completed run or destroys a chance at one.

The one rule that drives everything

A movable run is a set of face-up cards where every card is one rank lower than the one on it and all of them share a suit. You may pick such a run up and drop it onto any card exactly one rank higher. A queen goes on a king, a king goes on nothing, an ace goes on a two.

In one-suit mode the whole game uses a single suit, so every possible run is legal and the puzzle is generous. Two-suit mode uses the two black suits, the standard commercial setting. Four-suit mode uses all four and demands a colour match on top of the rank match — that is the version that produces the long, tense deals people remember.

Filling the board is the whole problem

Dealing from the stock is free of strategy: it hands one card to every column. Everything else is a fight over space. Cards can only ever leave a column by joining a completed run or by moving under a valid parent, so a column never becomes empty by accident — you have to clear it, and clearing it almost always means emptying another column first.

That is why good Spider play looks like triage rather than building. A move that reveals a face-down card is worth more than a tidy row, a tidy row is worth more than a large move, and a large move that completes thirteen cards in one suit is worth everything.

Why undo is generous here

Spider deals are long. A bad early decision can poison a column for thirty moves, and punishing the player for it is not interesting. So undo goes sixty steps deep and is always one button away. The top-quartile Spider players use it constantly — not because they cannot see three moves ahead, but because a full board makes a three-move plan expensive to keep in the head.

Fair play

There is no account, no sign-up and nothing leaves your browser. Each deal is shuffled locally, your best time per suit count is stored on your device, and the cards are drawn as pure CSS and text — no images to download, nothing to wait for.