How to Play Spider Solitaire
Spider is the big one. Two full decks, ten columns, no foundations to build on and no free cells to lean on. You win by assembling eight complete King-to-Ace runs and clearing them off the board.
It is also the solitaire most often abandoned halfway, usually because the player is treating it like Klondike. It is not like Klondike, and the difference is one rule.
The board
Ten columns hold 54 cards to start: the first four get six cards each, the remaining six get five. Only the bottom card of each column is face-up.
The stock holds the other 50 cards. It deals ten at a time — one card to every column at once — giving five deals in total.
There are no foundations and no waste pile. Completed runs leave the game entirely.
The rules
Columns build down by rank, and rank alone. A nine of hearts accepts any eight — clubs, spades, diamonds, hearts. Suit does not matter for landing.
But a run only moves as a unit if it shares a suit. This is the rule that defines Spider. A nine of hearts with an eight of spades below it is a legal position, but those two cards cannot travel together — you can only lift the eight. A nine, eight and seven all in hearts move as one.
That single asymmetry is the whole game: you are allowed to build sloppily, and punished later when the sloppy pile cannot be moved.
Any card may start an empty column. Empty columns are the most valuable thing on the board.
A King-to-Ace run in one suit is removed immediately and counts as one of your eight.
You cannot deal while any column is empty. Fill it first — this rule stops you from wasting a deal, and occasionally forces an awkward decision.
One suit, two suits, or four
Spider's difficulty is set by how many suits are in the two decks.
One suit uses 104 spades. Every run is automatically same-suit, so the movement restriction disappears and the game becomes a pure planning puzzle. This is the right place to learn the shape of the game.
Two suits is the standard middle setting and the one most people mean. The movement rule bites, but not brutally.
Four suits is the full game and genuinely hard — a large share of deals are unwinnable regardless of play.
Start at one suit until you win consistently. There is no virtue in losing to four suits while still learning the mechanics.
Strategy
Build in suit whenever you have the choice
Given a nine of spades and a nine of hearts to place your eight of spades on, the spade is almost always right — even when the heart looks more convenient. A same-suit pair can move later. A mixed pair is frozen until you unstack it.
This is the single habit that separates players who win from players who stall.
Empty columns are the whole game
An empty column lets you move any card anywhere, unstack a mixed pile, and rearrange whole sequences. Getting the first one is usually the turning point of a deal.
Guard it. Filling an empty column with a King feels productive and often is not — a King is the one card that can never be moved onto anything else, so you have converted a flexible resource into a permanent obstruction.
Uncover face-down cards before you deal
Every deal buries every column under a new card, including the neat suited runs you just built. Before dealing, extract what you can — flip face-down cards, consolidate suited sequences, and clear a column if it is close.
A deal made into a tidy board is an opportunity. A deal made into a mess makes the mess permanent.
Do not chase a run you cannot finish
Assembling ten cards of a suited run is only worth it if the last three are reachable. Count what is still buried before committing several moves to a run whose Ace is under four face-down cards in a column you have no plan for.
Undo is part of the game
Spider deals are frequently unwinnable at four suits, and even at two suits a single early mistake can decide the outcome. The deals here are seeded, so Replay deal gives you the same layout to attack differently. That is how the suit-building habit gets built.
Common questions
Why will this run not move? It contains more than one suit. Check the colours and pips along the sequence — the run must be a single suit from the card you grabbed to the bottom of the column.
Why can I not deal? A column is empty. Spider requires every column to hold at least one card before dealing.
Can I move a run onto a different suit? Yes. Landing is by rank only. It is lifting that requires a single suit.
How many deals do I get? Five, of ten cards each — 50 cards in total.
Are all deals winnable? No. At one suit nearly all are; at four suits a substantial fraction are not.
Last updated 2026-08-22