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Spider
Cards · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
Two packs, ten columns, and one job: build eight complete runs from king down to ace. Finish a run and it leaves the table. It is the patience that punishes a careless first ten minutes more than any other.
Where it comes from
Spider is a two-pack patience, a nineteenth-century idea — once cheap printing made owning two identical packs ordinary, the patience books filled up with games that needed a hundred and four cards. The name is recorded by the middle of the twentieth century, and the usual explanation is the eight completed runs: eight legs.
It reached most people through Windows, like Klondike before it, when Microsoft bundled a version around the turn of the century. And it found an audience that the older game did not, for one reason: Spider has far more decisions in it. In Klondike you mostly do the only thing available. In Spider you nearly always have five or six legal moves and most of them are wrong.
The difficulty setting is unusually honest. At one suit the game is a gentle puzzle almost always winnable. At four suits roughly half the deals cannot be won at all, and the ones that can need real planning. Nothing changes between them except how many colours of card are in the box — same layout, same rules — which makes it a rather good demonstration of where difficulty actually comes from.
How to play
| The layout | Ten columns, fifty-four cards, only the bottom of each column face up. |
|---|---|
| Building | Place a card on one of the next rank up, any suit. |
| Moving groups | A run may be moved together only if it is all in one suit and in order. |
| Dealing | Out of moves? Deal a new row — but only when no column is empty. |
| Winning | Eight runs, king to ace, each in one suit. Each one completed leaves the table. |
That rule about dealing is the trap: the deal is forced on all ten columns at once, and it buries whatever careful work you had in progress.
Our version
One suit, two suits and four, and undo, because a four-suit deal is a forty-minute piece of work and one slip should not cost all of it.
Three things that help
Keep a column empty as long as you can. An empty column is the only workspace the game gives you — somewhere to unstack a mess of mixed suits. Filling it with a king you did not need is the commonest way to lose.
Prefer same-suit builds even when another move looks tidier. Only a single-suit run can be picked up again. A mixed pile is a wall.
Before you deal, use every move you have. The new row lands everywhere at once, so anything you could have done cheaply becomes expensive a second later.