How to Play Spider Solitaire

Looking for a game that can turn against you at any moment, even late into a session? Try Spider Solitaire Classic 1.0 on SolitaireSite.com. This Spider variant demands patience, logical thinking, and a fair amount of luck. If you play at the highest difficulty, you will almost certainly need to restart several times. That only makes it more satisfying when you finally solve it.

This solitaire variant is played with 104 cards from two French decks. New to Spider Solitaire? Start with the one-suit or two-suit version to get comfortable with the basic rules. Like all solitaire variants, the concept is easy to pick up. Winning at the highest level with all four suits in play, however, requires real mental discipline and careful card management.

In Spider Solitaire Classic 1.0, you first choose your difficulty level. The initial layout always contains 54 cards spread across ten vertical columns. In the first four columns, five cards are placed face down with a sixth card face up on top. The remaining six columns each have four face-down cards with a fifth card face up. The remaining 50 cards form ten piles of five at the bottom right of the tableau, ready to be dealt.

Objective and Rules

The goal is to build complete sequences of 13 cards in the same suit from King down to Ace. To get there, you first build mixed-suit helper columns that gradually need to be converted into clean, single-suit runs. The following rules apply:

• Only fully visible cards can be moved.
• Face-down cards that are freed are turned face up immediately.
• Helper columns must be built in descending order without gaps.
• Suit does not matter for helper columns, with one exception: you can only move a sequence in a single move if all cards in it share the same suit.
• When no more moves are available, click the remaining cards at the bottom right to deal one new card to each column.
• Any complete, correctly ordered sequence from King to Ace in a single suit is automatically removed from the game.

You win when all cards have been cleared from the tableau. The game briefly congratulates you with a sound effect and a confirmation window. In most four-suit games, however, the game ends before that: all cards have been dealt, no moves remain, and even the hint button at the bottom center has no useful suggestion to offer.

The main difference from standard Spider Solitaire is the display above the tableau. On the left you see your current play time and number of moves. On the right is the score counter. You start with 500 points and lose one point per move. Each complete sequence removed earns you 100 points. At the far right, your best score of the current session is shown.

A Few Minutes or an Entire Evening

Spider Solitaire Classic 1.0 can be enjoyed casually at your own pace or used as the basis for a personal score challenge. Board games like Checkers, Nine Men's Morris, Chess and Backgammon are also available, both in two-player mode and against the computer. Classic online favorites like Hearts, Bubble Shooter and the Tetris-inspired Falling Cubes round out the selection. All games are free, no download required, playable directly in your browser.