Spider Solitaire Rules

Spider Solitaire uses two full decks at once — 104 cards total — dealt across ten columns, and the entire game is a single running effort to arrange those columns into complete King-to-Ace sequences of matching suit, each one vanishing off the board the moment it's finished.

Setup

Deal 104 cards (two standard 52-card decks shuffled together) across ten columns: the first four columns get six cards each, the remaining six columns get five cards each, with only the top card of every column turned face up. The rest of the deck becomes a stock, dealt out later in fixed rows of ten.

Playing a Move

Within the columns, you can move a card (or a valid sequence of cards already in descending, same-suit order) onto any other column's exposed card that's exactly one rank higher, regardless of that target card's suit — the suit-matching restriction only applies to sequences you're building or moving as a unit, not to where you're allowed to place a single card onto the board generally. Any face-down card revealed underneath a column by removing cards above it turns face up automatically and becomes playable. When you're out of useful moves, you can deal a new row of ten cards from the stock, one onto each column — but only if every column currently has at least one card in it; a fully emptied column blocks a stock deal until it's refilled by another move.

Completing and Clearing a Sequence

The moment a full King-to-Ace run of matching suit sits together, in order, within a single column, it's automatically removed from play entirely and set aside as a completed sequence. Clearing all eight such sequences (using every card in the two-deck set) wins the game.

Why the One-, Two-, and Four-Suit Versions Are Genuinely Different Games

Spider Solitaire is commonly played in three distinct difficulty tiers that use exactly the same board and rules but change which suits are actually present in the shuffled decks: the one-suit version uses two identical suits (so every card you see shares one suit with its counterpart, making sequences trivial to track), the two-suit version uses two decks made of two different suits each, and the four-suit version uses all four suits genuinely mixed, which makes matching suit correctly dramatically harder to plan for since a card that looks like a good fit by rank might belong to the wrong suit entirely for the sequence you're building. This isn't a minor difficulty slider — the jump from one-suit to four-suit is widely considered one of the largest difficulty gaps between variants of any solitaire game on this site.

Where Spider Solitaire Came From

Spider Solitaire's documented history stretches back further than many players assume: it appears in a 1917 book by noted bridge expert Ely Culbertson, and an even earlier reference surfaces in a 1937 publication called Games Digest, suggesting the game itself likely dates to at least the early 1930s in some recognizable form well before either printed mention. Its name comes straightforwardly from the number of completed sequences required to win — eight, matching a spider's eight legs. It reached a genuinely enormous new audience in 1998, when Microsoft bundled it into the Microsoft Plus! 98 expansion pack for Windows 98, and the later Windows XP version is still widely regarded by longtime solitaire players as the definitive digital implementation of the game.

Basic Strategy

Prioritizing which columns to empty completely, rather than simply chasing the biggest visible sequence, tends to matter more than new players expect — an empty column is a genuinely powerful resource, since it lets you temporarily relocate an entire sequence there to unblock a card underneath something else, which single-card moves alone often can't achieve. Uncovering face-down cards as early and as often as possible, even at the cost of a slightly less tidy column arrangement, is generally better than optimizing visible sequences while leaving unknown cards buried.

The Disagreements This Game Actually Produces

Since Spider Solitaire is a single-player game, there's little room for genuine rules disputes between players — the most common real disagreement, in a shared or teaching context, is whether moving a same-rank-but-mixed-suit partial sequence onto a matching top card should be allowed at all (standard rules require the moved group to be a genuine single-suit sequence to move as a unit; a mixed-suit "sequence" can only be moved one card at a time).

Questions People Still Ask Mid-Game

Can you move a sequence that isn't entirely the same suit, as long as the ranks are in descending order? Only as individual single-card moves — moving multiple cards together as one unit requires that whole group to share a single suit in unbroken descending order.

What happens if you deal a new row from the stock while a column is empty? Most standard rule sets don't allow it — every column must have at least one card before a new stock row can be dealt, which forces you to fill an empty column before drawing more cards.

Is there any way to undo a move once a hidden card is revealed? In the physical card version, no — once a card is turned and a decision is made, standard play treats it as final, the same as any other solitaire game.