How to Play Spider Solitaire
Learn Spider solitaire from scratch: two packs, ten columns, eight runs to build, and the one rule about suits that decides every game you play.
Rules checked against the engine that runs the board on .
Play Spider Solitaire now Free, in this tab, no sign-up How to play Spider Solitaire, step by step
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Look at what has been dealt
Spider solitaire uses two packs of cards shuffled together — 104 cards — dealt into ten columns across the table, which together are called the tableau. Fifty-four cards go out: six each to the first four columns and five to the other six, with only the last card of each column face up. The remaining fifty cards stay face down in the stock at the top left. There is no waste pile and no pile you play cards to by hand.
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Know what you are building
The goal of Spider is to build eight complete runs, each one a single suit going down from King to Ace: King, Queen, Jack, 10 and so on to the Ace. A run is built inside a tableau column, not on a separate pile. The moment a column ends in a finished King-to-Ace run in one suit, it lifts off the table by itself into one of the eight spaces at the top, and the card underneath turns face up. Clear all eight and the game is won.
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Move a card onto the next rank up
Any face-up card at the bottom of a column can be moved onto the bottom card of another column if that card is exactly one rank higher, no matter what suit either of them is. A red seven is a legal move onto a black eight. Colour does not matter in Spider at all, and matching suits is not required to place a card — it is only required to pick a group of cards back up, which is the subject of the next step.
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Learn the rule that decides the game: only same-suit runs move together
A single card always moves on its own. A group of cards can only be lifted and carried as one piece if it is already a run in the same suit, descending by one — the nine, eight and seven of hearts, for example. A nine of hearts on an eight of spades is a perfectly legal build, but those two cards can never travel together again. Building in suit whenever you have a choice is the whole skill of Spider.
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Deal a new row when you run out of moves
Click or tap the stock at the top left and one card is dealt face up onto every one of the ten columns at once. There are five of these deals in a game, and the game refuses to deal at all while any column is empty, so you must fill a gap before you can use the stock again. A deal buries every column by one card, so it is worth spending every useful move you have before you take one.
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Use an empty column, and pick the suits you want
A column you empty completely will accept any card or any movable run, not just a King, which makes an empty column the most useful thing on the Spider table — it is a place to unstack a mixed pile one card at a time. The suit control above the table sets the shoe: one suit is the gentle introduction, two suits is the standard game, and four suits is genuinely hard. Each one keeps its own record, because they are not the same game.
Play Spider Solitaire That is enough to start. The rest of this page is the reference.
The rules in full
Everything the Spider Solitaire lesson above skipped: the edge cases, what happens when you run out of moves, how the game ends and how it is scored. 8 sections, written to be looked things up in rather than read straight through — the contents at the top of the page jump to any of them.
The words on the table
Spider borrows most of its vocabulary from the rest of the solitaire family, but it uses two of the words differently, and that is where new players come unstuck.
- Shoe
- All the cards in play. Spider's shoe is two packs — 104 cards — which is why you will see two of every card.
- Tableau
- The ten columns of cards you play in. Everything in Spider happens here.
- Stock
- The face-down pile at the top left, holding the fifty cards not dealt. It deals a whole row at once, never a single card to a waste pile.
- Build
- To place a card on another card. In Spider you may build any card onto a card one rank higher, whatever the suits.
- Run
- Cards in one column in descending order and all of one suit. Only a run can be picked up as a group. A descending sequence in mixed suits is a legal build, but it is not a run and it does not move.
- Completed run
- A full King-down-to-Ace run in one suit. It leaves the table by itself. Eight of them is the win.
- Void
- An empty column. In Spider a void takes any card at all, and the stock will not deal while one is open.
The deal
Two packs are shuffled together and fifty-four cards are dealt into ten columns: six cards each into the first four columns, five into the remaining six. The last card of each column is turned face up; everything under it is face down. The other fifty cards stay in the stock, which is exactly five more rows of ten.
At one suit the shoe is 104 spades; at two suits it is spades and hearts, each appearing four times; at four suits it is two ordinary packs. The number of cards is always the same. Only the variety changes, and that is what makes the low-suit games easier.
Every legal move
- A card onto the next rank up, any suit. The bottom card of any column may move onto the bottom card of another column if that card is one rank higher. Suit and colour are irrelevant here.
- A same-suit run onto the next rank up. Several cards move together only if they are already in descending order in one suit. The card at the head of the run has to be one rank below the card it lands on — again, in any suit.
- Any card or run into an empty column. No rank restriction, unlike Klondike.
- A row from the stock. One card face up onto every column, all ten at once, refused while any column is empty.
A face-down card exposed at the bottom of a column turns face up immediately. There is no move that turns it back, no waste pile to sort through, and no way to play a card onto a foundation by hand — which brings us to the part of Spider that has no equivalent in Klondike.
Completed runs leave by themselves
When a column ends in a King, Queen, Jack, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two and Ace all of the same suit, that run is finished. It is lifted off the table automatically, into one of the eight spaces along the top, and the card it was sitting on turns face up. You never drag anything to those spaces — they are a record of what you have finished, not a pile you build.
This is why suits matter so much. A thirteen-card sequence in mixed suits is not a completed run and never becomes one; it just sits there, immovable, on top of whatever you needed.
When you run out of moves
You have five deals. Each one buries every column under a new card, including the columns you had in good order, so a deal is always a step backwards in the short term. Two habits follow from that: spend every useful move before you deal, and empty a column before you deal if you possibly can, because a void is the one asset a deal cannot take away — except that the deal will not happen at all while a void is open, so you will have to fill it first.
When the stock is empty and nothing on the table will move, the game is over. The board will tell you. Until then, Undo steps back through the last thousand moves of the deal, and Hint will show a legal move if one exists.
How Spider is scored
The board starts at 500. Every move costs one point, a completed run pays 100, and the score never falls below zero. That is Microsoft Spider’s scoring, and the consequence is worth understanding: a game won in 180 moves scores better than the same game won in 300, so undoing and re-doing a plan is not free. The clock beside it is a plain timer. Best score, fastest win and fewest moves are kept for each suit count separately — a one-suit win is not a four-suit win, and filing them together would make the number meaningless. A time is only recorded for a game you won.
Where this game makes a choice
- Two packs, ten columns, five deals — the standard game. Some versions deal four rounds or six; ours follows the fifty-card stock, which is five.
- No redeal and no waste pile. Cards go from the stock straight onto the columns. There is nothing to recycle.
- The deal is refused over an empty column, as the standard rules require.
- Any card may start an empty column, as in the standard game.
- One, two and four suits, with a separate record each. Three-suit Spider exists in some collections; we have not built it because nobody searches for it and it sits awkwardly between two versions people do want.
- Hints can be switched off. Lifting a card rings the piles it may legally go to. That is genuine help, so it is a control rather than a permanent feature, and it remembers what you chose.
Where these rules come from
The rules on this page follow the standard game as recorded on
Pagat, John McLeod’s card-game rules archive, and each
one was checked against the code that runs this board — the build and run rules
in our solitaire engine’s rules.ts, the row deal and the automatic harvesting of
completed runs in its game.ts. If the page and the game ever disagree,
tell us: a rules correction gets a test written for it so it cannot
come back.