How to play Spider Solitaire (4 Suits)

Build eight complete king-to-ace runs, one suit at a time, from a full two-deck spread of all four suits. Clear the board to win the hardest Spider there is.

104 cards across all four suits land in ten columns (six in the first four, five in the rest), tops face up. The stock keeps 50 cards for five more deals.

Build down in any suit, but only same-suit descending runs move as a group.
Tap or drag a card to move it with its run. Empty columns accept any card or run.
Tap the stock to deal one card onto every column, only when none is empty.
A completed king-to-ace run in a single suit clears itself automatically.

Tips

Prioritize same-suit builds ruthlessly; every off-suit move is a debt you repay later.
Don't fear the undo button; serious 4-suit play is about exploring lines, not guessing once.
Keep one column as a workspace whenever possible; with four suits you'll need it constantly.

Four-suit Spider is the full game: two decks, all four suits mixed into the same ten columns, eight king-to-ace runs to build in a single suit each. Nothing about the rules is different from the easier versions on this site, but with four suits competing for the same ten columns, almost every move you make is a compromise between two imperfect options.

This is the hardest version of Spider there is, not because any single rule is complicated, but because the number of ways to lock yourself out grows fast once four suits are in play. Expect longer games, more backtracking, and wins that feel earned rather than routine.

Almost every move is a compromise

In one-suit Spider, every placement is automatically correct, because every card matches. In four-suit Spider, the card that fits by rank is only in-suit with what's underneath it maybe a quarter of the time, purely by the odds of four suits being spread across the board. Most of the time you're choosing between two off-suit spots or one off-suit spot and no spot at all.

That means the question isn't "can I place this card," it's "which placement costs me the least later." A card buried under one useless off-suit card is recoverable in a couple of moves; the same card buried under three is a much bigger problem, and with four suits on the board, three-deep is easy to end up with if you're not tracking it.

Treat every off-suit move as a debt

This is the core discipline four-suit Spider demands. Every time you place a card on a different suit, you're borrowing space now and agreeing to pay it back later, when you have to peel that card off one at a time instead of moving a run. The two-suit version introduces this idea; the four-suit version makes it unavoidable, since in-suit spots are scarce and you'll take off-suit ones constantly.

Before you take on that debt, look at what it's blocking. An off-suit card sitting on top of a column with two more face-down cards underneath is a worse debt than the same card sitting on an already-cleared column, because it's delaying information you still need, not just a run you'd like to tidy up.

Lean on undo instead of guessing once

Four-suit Spider punishes the instinct to make a move and see what happens. With four suits tangled together, a move that looks fine can quietly close off the one line that was actually winnable, and you often won't feel the consequences for another ten or twenty moves, by which point it's hard to tell which earlier decision caused the jam.

Undo is unlimited, so use it that way. Play a few moves deep, see whether the board opens up or tightens, and back out if it tightens. This isn't cheating, it's how the game is meant to be explored at this difficulty; treating your first instinct as final is how four-suit games get stuck.

Keep one column open as a workspace

An empty column matters in every Spider variant, but four-suit is where you feel its absence the most. With four suits to sort, you'll constantly need a place to temporarily lift a short stack so you can re-sort what's underneath it or reunite a run that ended up split across two columns.

Guard that empty column harder than you would in the easier versions. Filling it the moment it opens might feel like progress, but you'll usually need it again within a few moves, and re-creating it from a full board is much harder than keeping one open in the first place. Deal from the stock only once you've genuinely run out of moves without one, since a new row buries whatever careful in-suit sorting you've managed so far.

How winnable is four-suit Spider

There's no published, methodology-disclosed figure for four-suit Spider that we'd stand behind. The recyclable stock makes an exact solver search far more expensive than what we run for games like Golf and Pyramid, and the community estimates that exist online don't disclose how they were produced, so we're not citing them as research. We'd rather say nothing than publish a number we can't back up.

What we can say is that four-suit is genuinely hard. It's the least forgiving of the three variants here by a wide margin, and even players who are comfortable with two-suit Spider often win this version only occasionally, not every sitting. That's normal. Deals are seeded and reproducible but never filtered for winnability, so a long losing streak doesn't necessarily mean your play is off, it might mean you've hit a run of tough deals.