Spider Solitaire

Before your first move: read the table

Pull up a chair and look before you touch anything. Every new game hides 44 cards face down. The four columns on the left each hold five hidden cards under one face-up card; the six on the right hold four hidden cards each. Fifty more wait in the stock, which pays out ten at a time, five times in all.

That count tells you where the easy wins live. The right-hand columns are one card shorter, so they are usually the first to empty. Glance along the ten face-up cards and look for pairs one rank apart, such as a 9 next to a 10 elsewhere. Then ask a simple question of each possible move: does it turn a hidden card over? A move that flips a card is almost always better than one that just tidies.

An opening played out

Picture an Easy (one suit) deal where the face-up row reads, left to right: K, 4, 9, 2, J, 5, 10, 3, 8, Q.

There are four tempting moves: the 9 onto the 10, the J onto the Q, the 4 onto the 5, and the 2 onto the 3. Play all four. Each one lifts a lone card off a hidden pile, so you flip four cards without spending anything you will miss. Then the 8 in column nine can follow the 9 onto column seven, building 10-9-8 in one suit and flipping a fifth card.

Notice what you left alone: the King in column one. A King can only ever move into an empty column, so there is no point worrying about it yet. Work the short columns on the right until one empties, and only then think about where the big cards belong.

Habits that quietly cost you the deal

None of these feel like mistakes at the time, which is what makes them dangerous.

• Taking the first legal move you see. With eight copies of every rank in play, there are often two or three places a card could go. Check them all and prefer the one that keeps a suit together or uncovers a card.
• Burying the column you are trying to dig out. If column six has one hidden card left, do not pile a long stack on top of it. Build on columns that are already fully face up.
• Shuffling a card back and forth. Moving a 7 from one 8 to another 8 and back costs a point each time and changes nothing. If you catch yourself doing it, you are stuck and it is time to think about the stock.
• Forgetting that a deal can finish a run. The game checks every column after a deal, so a column ending in a same-suit King down to 2 will clear the moment an Ace of that suit lands on it.
• Treating Hard like Easy. In one-suit games almost every placement builds a run that can move later. With four suits most placements do not, so every off-suit drop deserves a second look.

Easy, Medium and Hard on MerryArcade

Every mode uses 104 cards, but the suit mix changes. Easy is all spades: eight full sets of thirteen. Medium deals four sets of spades and four of hearts. Hard uses all four suits, two sets each. Red and black make no difference to where a card may go; only rank matters for placing, and only suit matters for lifting a group.

The step from Easy to Medium is gentler than it sounds, because a heart and a spade are easy to tell apart at a glance. Hard is a different game. With only two cards of any exact rank and suit, you will often have to drop a card off-suit just to reach a hidden one, then come back later and sort it out using an empty column. The game remembers the last mode you chose, and you can switch from the ↻ button, which asks first if you are mid-game.

Think of the score as a move budget

You begin on 500. Every move and every deal takes one point away, and every finished King-to-Ace run adds 100, so one completed run pays for a hundred actions. The score can never fall below zero, and the timer runs only for your own interest.

A practical way to use this: a win that takes 250 actions, five deals included, finishes on 1,050. Shave that to 200 and you finish on 1,100. Your best is saved on your device only when you win, so a scrappy first win still counts, and you can chase a cleaner one later. Undo hands back the point as well as the move, which makes it a free scouting tool rather than a penalty.

When the stock runs dry

After the fifth deal, nothing new arrives. From here the game is pure planning, and it often helps to stop and count. Pick a suit and ask where its King, Queen and Jack are sitting; a run can only be completed in a column where those top cards can be reached.

Group your work around empty columns. One empty column lets you take a mixed stack apart a card at a time; two let you shift much longer chains. Since there is no limit on how many cards move together, a long same-suit run can always travel in one go, so assemble pieces into one suit first and carry them as a block. Completed runs vanish automatically, and the card beneath them flips, sometimes opening the very space you needed.

Questions about Spider Solitaire