Spider Solitaire is the great two-deck patience game, and it rewards care above raw luck. Two full decks — 104 cards — are dealt into ten columns, and your job is to build orderly sequences downward until you can peel off a complete King-to-Ace run in a single suit. Assemble all eight of those runs and the board is beaten. It is a slower, more deliberate test than a one-deck game: every row you deal fights against the tidy columns you have carefully built.
How to play Spider Solitaire
The opening deal gives you 54 cards spread across ten columns — the four leftmost columns hold six cards each and the rest hold five, with only the bottom card of every column face up. You build downward in rank regardless of colour, so a red nine will happily sit on any ten. What makes Spider special is the suit rule for moving stacks: only cards already in descending same-suit order travel together, so a neat run of ten-nine-eight of hearts lifts as one unit, while a mixed-suit descending sequence must be shifted a card at a time. Whenever a column shows an unbroken King-through-Ace run in one suit, that run is automatically removed and banked. When you exhaust your moves, click the stock to deal one fresh card onto every column at once — the game demands that no column be empty first. New to card games? Warm up on Klondike, or test the tactics of the spider-family Scorpion.
Spider Solitaire strategy & tips
Empty columns are the currency of Spider Solitaire — a bare column is a workbench where you can park any card, unstack an awkward pile, or reorganise a suit you are trying to consolidate. Prize them, and think twice before covering one with a lone King. Build in suit wherever you have the choice, even if an alternating-colour move looks tempting, because only same-suit runs move as a block and off-suit sequences trap the cards beneath them. Always look to turn a face-down card face up: exposing hidden cards is how the board opens up, so a move that flips a new card usually beats a move that merely tidies. Before you hit the stock, squeeze every legal move out of the tableau first, since a fresh deal lands on top of your work and often buries a card you needed. Lean on undo to experiment — reading several moves ahead is the whole skill here.
One-suit, two-suit and four-suit Spider Solitaire
Spider Solitaire scales its difficulty through the number of suits in play, and choosing the right level is half the fun. The one-suit game uses 104 cards that are all, say, spades; because every card matches, any descending run moves freely and you are really just solving an ordering puzzle — ideal for learning the flow and reliably winnable with care. The two-suit game mixes spades and hearts, so you must now keep colours from contaminating your runs and start valuing empty columns as sorting space; win rates drop but stay comfortable for a thoughtful player. The four-suit game is the classic and the reason Spider has its reputation: with all four suits present, same-suit runs are scarce, most sequences will not move as a unit, and a single misjudged deal can lock the board. Treat one and two suits as training grounds, then graduate to four suits when you want the full patience-and-challenge experience.