Spider
The two-deck solitaire. Ten columns, fifty cards waiting in the stock, and runs you build down from king to ace that lift off the table the moment they are whole. Start with one suit and work up to four. Free, full screen, and it saves itself.
The game
Spider deals fifty four cards into ten columns, six in the first four and five in the rest, with only the top card of each face up, and keeps the other fifty as a stock. Any card may be placed on a card one rank higher, whatever its suit, but only a run of one suit moves as a group. When a column shows a full run from king down to ace in a single suit, the run lifts off into a done pile on its own. Eight done piles win the deal.
When you are stuck, tap the stock to deal a new row: one card on every column, face up, covering whatever you had built. The stock holds five such deals, and a deal is refused while any column stands empty, so fill the gap first. A face-down card left on top of a column turns over as soon as the cards above it move away. Drag a card or a run, or tap it and the game moves it to the best place. Undo is a tap away, a game you leave is waiting when you return, and a tally keeps your deals, wins and times for each number of suits separately.
One suit, two, or four
One suit is the gentle game: eight copies of the spades, where every run you build is already in suit and most deals can be won with care. Two suits brings in the hearts, so half the parents on offer will take a card without letting it travel on, and the planning begins. Four suits is the classic two-deck Spider, the hard game, where a win is something to tell people about. Each count keeps its own statistics and its own best score.
Standard scoring, and the words it goes by
The scoring is the familiar one: five hundred points at the deal, one point off for every move, the deals from the stock included, and a hundred points for every run that lifts off. The score never drops below zero. An undo costs one point. Timed play adds a finishing bonus of six hundred less the seconds the deal took, so a quick win pays and a slow one simply does not. Or turn scoring off and just play.
What the scoring pays
The Scoring setting picks the ruleset, and the Timed switch adds the last row.
| Standard | |
|---|---|
| Start of the deal | 500 |
| Each move | -1 |
| Run completed | +100 |
| Undo | -1 each |
| Lowest score | 0 |
| Timed play | Bonus of 600 minus the seconds taken, never below 0 |
The rules we play by
These are the rules as the well-known descriptions of the game agree on them, and as the Windows game played them: fifty four cards dealt as six, six, six, six, five, five, five, five, five and five with the tops turned up; the fifty in the stock dealt ten at a time and only while no column is empty; building down regardless of suit; runs of one suit moving together; a king to ace run in one suit lifting off; and the Windows score of five hundred, less one a move, plus a hundred a run. The rest of the table is as you would expect from the other games here: the cards bounce when you win, the deal animates, and a controller or the keyboard works as well as a mouse or a finger.
Anywhere, free
On a phone you can add the game to your home screen and it opens like an app. There is a desktop app for Windows and Linux for people who want it in the taskbar again. An account is optional and only saves your statistics and settings between devices. The same site has Freecell and Klondike Solitaire, and Spades and Hearts to play with friends by a four-letter code or invite link, all free.