pips&pegs

Spider Solitaire

One suit. Build a king-to-ace run and watch it leave the table.

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Spider is a game of patience in the older sense: you're not sending cards up to foundations one at a time, you're assembling entire runs from king down to ace, and only when a run is complete does it fly off the board. Two decks, ten columns, one hundred and four cards.

This is the one-suit version, which is the sensible place to start — all the shape of Spider without the misery. Get comfortable here and the two- and four-suit versions are the same game with the knives out.

How Spider Solitaire works

  1. Build columns downwards by rank. In one-suit spider every card is the same suit, so anything descending works.
  2. A complete king-to-ace run is removed from the table automatically. Eight of them and you've won.
  3. Tap the stock to deal one card onto every column at once.
  4. Spider will not deal while any column is empty — fill it first. This rule catches everybody once.
  5. Empty columns are your workspace: somewhere to unpick a tangle. Guard them.

Questions

Why won't it deal me new cards?

Because one of your columns is empty. Spider refuses to deal unless every column has at least one card — it's a real rule, not a bug, and it exists to stop you hoarding an empty column forever. Drop something in it and the stock will work again.

What happens when I complete a run?

King down to ace, all in order, sitting at the bottom of a column: it disappears from the table and lands on a foundation. That's how you win — eight complete runs, and the board is bare.

Is one-suit spider too easy?

It's the gentle version, yes — most one-suit deals fall to careful play. But it teaches the thing that actually matters in Spider: sequencing. Learn to unpick a column here, and two-suit becomes possible rather than baffling.

The rest of the table

Same engine, different rulebooks. They're all free, and none of them want your email.

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