How to play Spider Solitaire
Build eight complete runs from king down to ace. Each finished run flies off the board; clear all 104 cards and you win.
Two full decks are dealt into ten columns (the first four get six cards, the rest five), with only the top card of each face up. The remaining 50 cards wait in the stock for five fresh rows.
- Stack cards in descending order. In this one-suit game every card matches, so any run you build can move together.
- Tap or drag a card to move it with everything stacked on it. Empty columns take any card or run.
- Tap the stock to deal a new card onto every column, but only when no column is empty.
- Complete a king-to-ace run and it clears itself off the board.
Tips
- Turn face-down cards over early; a hidden card you can't see is the one that blocks you later.
- Empty a column whenever you can; it's the most powerful workspace in the game.
- Deal a new row only when you're out of useful moves; every deal buries your tidy stacks.
One-suit Spider is the friendliest way into the game. Two decks, ten columns, eight runs to build from king down to ace, but every single card in the deck is the same suit. That one fact changes everything about how the game plays, because it means any descending run you build, no matter how long, can move as a single group.
Klondike players sometimes assume Spider is just a bigger, harder version of the same game. It isn't, and this version is the place to find out why: no foundations to send cards up to, no color rule to track, just one long push to sort 104 cards into eight tidy runs.
Why one suit changes the whole game
In Klondike, a run has to alternate red and black, and a run practically never gets long enough to matter much when you drag it. In Spider, a run is any unbroken descending sequence, and it can be enormous: a nine-card run from king to five is completely normal here, and with one suit, that whole run drags in a single motion the moment you touch its top card.
That's the entire appeal of this version. You never have to stop and check whether the card underneath breaks the sequence by suit, because it can't. If it's one rank lower, it belongs to the run. This is the version to play until moving a stack of cards feels automatic, because two-suit and four-suit Spider both ask you to build that same habit under much stricter conditions.
Uncover before you tidy
Every column starts with several cards dealt face down, and you can't plan around a card you haven't seen yet. Treat turning over a new face-down card as more valuable than a move that just makes an already-visible run look neater. A column with two hidden cards left in it is worth more attention right now than a column that's already sorted.
This matters more in Spider than in Klondike because you don't have a foundation pile giving you a place to offload cards as you go. Every card you're not actively using has to live somewhere on the tableau, so the order you uncover things in determines how much room you have to work with later.
Hoard your empty columns
An empty column is the single most useful thing on the board. Unlike Klondike, where only a king can start a new pile, an empty Spider column takes any card or any run, of any length. That makes it a free parking spot: a place to temporarily set down a run so you can dig under the column it came from, then put it right back, or somewhere better.
Don't spend an empty column carelessly. Before you fill one, ask whether you're solving a real problem or just making the board look cleaner. The player who keeps an empty column in reserve as long as possible almost always has more options in the endgame than the one who fills every gap the moment it opens up.
Don't deal too early
The stock deals one new card onto every column at once, and you can only do it when no column is empty. That restriction is a hint about how the game wants to be played: dealing buries whatever you've built. A ten-card run you just assembled gets a fresh, unrelated card dropped on top of it, and now you have to clear that card again before the run underneath is usable.
Work through every move you can find on the board first. Only reach for the stock once you're genuinely out of useful options, not because dealing feels like progress. It rarely is, since it adds ten new cards to sort rather than removing any.
How winnable is one-suit Spider
We don't have a published figure we'd stand behind for any Spider variant, one-suit included. Klondike and FreeCell both have rigorous solver-backed research behind their numbers; Spider's recyclable stock makes that kind of exhaustive proof far more expensive to run, and nobody we could find has published a methodology-disclosed figure broken out by suit count. So we won't invent one.
What we can say with confidence is the ordering: one-suit Spider is the most winnable of the three variants on this site by a wide margin, since there's no suit-tangling to work against you. Two-suit is a real step up in difficulty, and four-suit is genuinely hard, the kind of game strong players still lose more often than they win. The deals here are seeded and reproducible but never filtered for winnability, so a bad deal is always possible even in this easiest version.