How to play Spider Solitaire (2 Suits)
Build eight complete king-to-ace runs, each in a single suit. Finished runs clear off the board; remove all 104 cards to win.
Two decks of spades and hearts are dealt into ten columns (six cards in the first four, five in the rest), with the top cards face up. The stock holds 50 cards for five more rows.
- Stack cards in descending order on any suit, but only same-suit runs move together: a sequence of spades travels as one, a mixed stack doesn't.
- Tap or drag a card to move it with its run. Empty columns take anything.
- Tap the stock to deal a card onto every column, allowed only when no column is empty.
- Complete a king-to-ace run in one suit and it sweeps itself off the board.
Tips
- Keep suits together whenever you have the choice; off-suit stacking buys time but blocks runs.
- Uncover face-down cards before perfecting your stacks; information wins games.
- Use empty columns to rebuild mixed stacks into single-suit runs.
Two-suit Spider adds spades and hearts to the same ten-column, eight-run structure as one-suit Spider, and that second suit changes the whole texture of the game. A run only moves as a group when every card in it shares a suit; stack a red six on a black seven and you've built something legal to look at but useless to drag, because the six won't come with the seven anymore.
If you've been playing one-suit Spider, this is the honest next step. The rules barely change, but the skill you need does: you now have to think about which suit a card belongs to before you place it, not just which rank.
Same-suit runs move together, mixed stacks don't
This is the one rule that defines this version of the game. Put a black six on a black seven and later grab that seven, and both cards come with you, run intact. Put that same black six on a red seven instead, and the stack looks identical on screen, but the seven is now stuck: you can only move the six by itself, because the run underneath it is a different suit.
That's a trap a lot of players fall into coming from the one-suit version, where this distinction didn't exist. Before you place a card, check what's already on top of the pile you're aiming for. If the suits don't match, you're not building a movable run, you're just parking a card there temporarily, whether you meant to or not.
Build in-suit whenever you have the choice
When two columns both offer a legal spot for the same card, one matching its suit and one not, take the matching one. A run that stays in one suit keeps growing into something you can move as a block later; a mixed stack is a run in appearance only; it holds position but it doesn't travel.
This preference should shape how you play from the very first moves, not just in the endgame. Every off-suit placement you make early is a small debt: eventually you'll want to move that card, and when you do, you'll have to peel it off one card at a time instead of dragging the whole run at once.
Off-suit stacking is a loan, not a solution
Sometimes there's no in-suit spot available and you have to park a card somewhere off-suit anyway. That's fine, it's a normal part of the game, but treat it as temporary. An off-suit stack is a problem you've deferred, not one you've solved, and it will cost you moves to undo later, usually right when you need speed the most.
Empty columns are how you pay that debt back. Use one to lift an off-suit card or short mixed stack out of the way, then re-sort what's underneath, then decide where the lifted card actually belongs now that you can see more of the board. This is a skill one-suit Spider never asks for, since every stack there is automatically in-suit.
Two suits, still one deal-timing rule
The stock still deals a new card onto every column at once, and you still can't do it with an empty column on the board. That restriction bites harder here than in one-suit Spider, because a deal doesn't just bury a run, it can bury a run you were carefully keeping in-suit, forcing you to dig it back out before you can use it again.
Exhaust your in-suit and re-sorting options before you deal. A new row is easy to reach for when you feel stuck, but check first whether an empty column could unstick you instead, since dealing adds ten more cards you'll eventually have to sort by suit too.
How winnable is two-suit Spider
There's no published figure we'd stand behind for Spider broken out by suit count, two-suit included, and Spider's recyclable stock makes the kind of exhaustive proof we run for games like Golf and Pyramid impractical here. We're not going to invent a percentage just to have one on the page.
What's safe to say is the relative difficulty: two-suit Spider is a genuine step up from one-suit, since suit-matching now costs you moves and options that the one-suit game never charges for. It's also meaningfully easier than four-suit, where you're sorting four suits into the same ten columns instead of two. Deals here are seeded and reproducible, never filtered for winnability, so expect some deals to be tougher than others regardless of how well you play.