Spider Solitaire

Playing the one-suit board well

Spider is a marathon, not a sprint. The goal is to build eight complete sequences from King down to Ace and clear them all, and in this one-suit version every card belongs to the same suit, the friendliest way to learn, because any card can legally sit on any card one rank higher. Don't let that lull you into careless play, though. The order you build things in still decides whether you finish or freeze.

The golden rule is to keep your sequences in proper order for as long as you can. When you drop a nine onto a ten of the same suit, that pair travels as a block later; a jumble of out-of-order cards piled on a column locks it solid and there's nothing you can do with it.

The empty-column engine

Here's a concrete piece of technique. Say one column ends with an 8 sitting on a 10, and another column ends with a 9. As things stand the 8 blocks the 10 and the 9 is going nowhere. With one empty column you can fix all of it: move the 8 into the space, drop the 9 onto the 10, then land the 8 on the 9. Three moves, and you've turned three strays into a 10-9-8 block, revealed a fresh card where the 9 used to be, and emptied the workspace again for the next repair. That last part is the point: make a habit of finishing these manoeuvres with the column empty again, so the engine is always ready to run. It's also why you should think twice before parking a King in a space. Nothing ranks above a King, so once he's down he can never move onto anything; he's furniture. Only give him the column when you genuinely intend to build his run in place, and accept that the workspace is retired.

Count the stock: five deals of ten

The numbers behind the board are worth knowing. Spider uses 104 cards, 54 of them dealt to the ten columns at the start, which leaves exactly fifty in the stock: five deals of ten cards each. That's your entire budget of fresh material, and each deal drops one card on every column, ordered or not. A deal is a small act of vandalism you get to schedule, so make the board deal-proof first: tidy every run into descending order, flip as many face-down cards as you can, and deal with your empty columns deliberately, because the game won't let you deal at all while one sits open. Then take the ten newcomers and start excavating again. Players who lose track of the remaining deals either hoard the stock long past the point of usefulness or burn through it while the board is still a mess; a glance at it before every big decision keeps the endgame honest.

Tactics that keep the board flowing

• Empty a column whenever the chance appears. It's the single most useful thing on the board, a place to unload a King or untangle a mess.
• Never deal a fresh row from the stock while an empty column is helping you, because dealing refills every column at once.
• Expose face-down cards early; a flipped card is a new option, and stalled games are almost always games with too many cards still hidden.
• Build long ordered runs before you deal, so a single deal doesn't bury the cards you need under junk.

Why it earns its name

Spider is named for the eight legs of a spider: the eight complete runs you must assemble to win. The game goes back at least to the 1930s and 40s, when it was reportedly a favourite of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and it reached most living players through Windows, where Microsoft's version quietly became one of the most-played computer games in history. In its full two-suit or four-suit form it's one of the tougher patience games, with a modest win rate even for strong players. Stripped back to a single suit, as here, it becomes a much gentler puzzle you can finish regularly while still rewarding the same forward planning. Clear the board and you've untangled all 104 cards into eight tidy King-to-Ace columns.