Spider Solitaire — 4 Suits

Four-suit Spider is the version the other two are practice for. Two complete decks, all four suits, dealt into ten columns; eight complete runs to clear; five deals from the stock and not one more. Every rule is the same as in two-suit Spider. What changes is how often the one rule that matters gets in your way.

That rule: you may place any card on any card one rank higher, whatever the suit, but you may only pick up a run that is a single suit from top to bottom. With two suits, half your placements are in suit by accident. With four, most of them are not, and a table full of legal-looking descending runs can be a table on which almost nothing can move. Four-suit Spider is a game about refusing moves you are allowed to make.

Where the game is actually won

Not in the runs — in the empty columns. An empty column is the only place a mixed run can be taken apart, one in-suit piece at a time, and the number of empty columns you hold decides how large a tangle you can unpick. Strong players count empty columns the way chess players count tempo: one column is survival, two is room to work, three is a position you can probably win. The deal takes them away — it drops a card on every column, empty ones included — so the rhythm of the game is to build, to empty, to move everything that can move, and only then to deal and start repairing.

The stock refuses to deal while any column is empty. That is not the game protecting you; it is the game forcing you to spend your best asset before it gives you more cards. Filling the column with a single card you can lift again is the standard answer. Filling it with a mixed run is how deals are lost.

Playing it here

The ten columns fit a phone screen and grow to fill a desktop, and the cards keep their proportions at every size. Touch a card and the in-suit run beneath it lifts; a run that will not lift shakes instead, so the rule is never silent. Legal destinations are marked before you commit, a completed run lifts off the table by itself, and undo goes back a thousand moves within a deal — further than any real deal runs — because this is a puzzle, and you are allowed to think with your hands.

An honest record

The panel under the table keeps your best time, your win streak, your win rate and how many four-suit deals you have finished, on this device and nowhere else. Four suits is kept separately from one and two suits, because a four-suit clear is a different achievement. Expect the win rate to be low. That is the game, not you.

Four suits is the version where reading the card matters most, so the size control earns its place: L draws large cards, the largest that fit, with the corner index big enough to tell a club from a spade at a glance. The table is green felt until you pick another surface, high contrast included.