Spider Solitaire

The table, and how you win

Spider is dealt from 2 decks — 104 cards — and that is what makes it a different game from Solitaire and FreeCell rather than a larger one. 54 of those cards go to the table, dealt 1 at a time from the left, so the first 4 columns end up holding 6 cards each and the other 6 hold 5. Only the top card of each column starts face up.

The other 50 cards are the stock: 1 tap deals 1 card to every column at once, so the stock is spent in 5 deals. A run of 13 cards in the same suit, king down to ace, leaves the columns for the Completed runs area, and 8 of them wins the game.

• Columns: the 10 piles you build in. Only face-up cards can be moved.
• Stock: the 50 cards you have not seen yet. Tap it to deal a row.
• Completed runs: 8 slots for the runs that are finished. No move brings a run back out of them; only Undo does.
• The 4 leftmost columns hide 5 face-down cards each and the other 6 hide 4 — 44 cards you cannot see when the deal starts.

Two decks is where this game parts company with the other two card games here: Solitaire and FreeCell each play a single 52-card deck, and this table carries 104. There are also no foundations to feed from the ace upwards — a run is assembled in the columns themselves, and it only leaves once it is complete.

Controls

• Tap a card to pick it up. Every place it may legally go lights up at the same time, and both the cards you are holding and their destinations are marked by lift and outline as well as colour.
• Tap a destination and the cards move there. Tap somewhere they cannot go and the selection moves to whatever is movable there, or clears — an illegal tap is never scolded.
• Everything is tap-to-move. There is no drag and drop, so nothing depends on holding a card steady across a table 10 columns wide.
• Tap the stock to deal a row. Its label counts deals left, from 5 down to 0, rather than cards left — deals are what you are actually keeping track of.
• Undo and Hint sit in the bar under the table. Retry same board is in the top bar and asks before it restarts: it deals you the same cards again, because a deal comes from a seed.

What stacks, what travels, and when the stock will deal

Placing a card is loose. Anything may sit on a card 1 rank higher, whatever the suit — a red 8 onto a black 9 is an ordinary move — and an empty column accepts any card at all.

Moving more than 1 card is the part that decides the game. A group only travels if it is a single suit in descending order. Loose stacks are easy to build and impossible to move as one, and telling those two apart, early, is most of Spider.

• Placing: onto a card exactly 1 rank higher, suit ignored. An empty column takes anything.
• Moving a group: only a same-suit descending run travels as one. Tap the card you want to lead with and everything stacked on it comes along, provided the whole group qualifies.
• There is no carry limit. A qualifying run of any length moves in one go. Spider has nothing like FreeCell’s carrying capacity, because the difficulty here is building a run, not finding room for one.
• 1 move is 1 action: a group moved, whatever its size, or 1 deal from the stock. A face-down card turning over and a finished run leaving the table both happen as part of the move that caused them, and cost 0 moves of their own.
• The stock will not deal while any column stands empty. That is the classic rule, and the app says why in one quiet line instead of doing nothing. There is no error sound, because this is information rather than a failure.

You have to be able to read the suits for the travel rule to work, and 10 columns leave little room for it: at 320px a card is about 28px across, with about 11px of it showing from under the next one. So the corner index puts the suit beside the rank instead of under it — stacked the other way, the rank was cut in half at that width until K, Q and J could not be told apart. Colour alone will not carry the suit either, because at 4 suits spades and clubs are both black.

Undo, Hint, and running out of moves

Undo and Hint are both unlimited and free, and neither sits behind an ad or a purchase. The number of hints you used is shown when you win, as a fact rather than a cost.

Undo steps back 1 move and everything that move brought with it: a card that turned face up goes back down, a completed run comes back to its column, a dealt row of 10 returns to the stock. Your move count is restored along with the board. Undo history is not saved between sessions, so it covers the game you are in rather than the one you closed yesterday.

• Hint reads the board exactly as it stands and offers 1 move, chosen by a fixed order of preference rather than at random. It does not look ahead, and it never promises the deal can still be won.
• It will not suggest a sideways shuffle that uncovers nothing, extends nothing and empties nothing. Those moves are legal, reversible and endless — offered as advice they would walk you in a circle all afternoon.
• It will not break up a same-suit run you have already tidied, either.
• There is exactly 1 exception to the sideways rule: the move that fills your last empty column while the stock is waiting on it. Nothing on the board looks different afterwards, but the board can deal again — the opposite of a move that goes nowhere. A move that empties its own source does not qualify, because the hole has shifted rather than closed.
• The outline falls on that one move — the run that travels and the single card receiving it — never on a whole column. A Spider column is long, and most of it is not going anywhere.

A deal can run out of moves. Once the stock is spent and nothing fits anywhere, the app says so once, quietly, beside the table — no overlay across the board and no verdict. Undo takes you back from there as far as you like. Sliding an entire column into an empty one does not count as a move for this purpose, because the board afterwards would be the same board.

Suits, the daily deal, and what is recorded

Suits is the difficulty, set on the game’s home screen: 1 suit, 2 suits or 4 suits. 1 suit is the default. The setting applies from the next deal, so the ground never shifts under a game in progress.

Changing it does not change which cards are dealt where. The same seed lays the same cards in the same places at every difficulty — what changes is how many suits they are read as, and therefore how much of the table can travel together. That is why the daily deal is 1 deal rather than 3.

• Daily Challenge is 1 deal a day, taken from your device’s local date and the same for every player. The last 30 days stay open, with no condition attached to any of them.
• The daily deal is played at whatever suit count you have set, so two players can meet the same cards on the same day at very different difficulties.
• No streak is counted or shown. What is recorded is which days you won, never how many in a row, so a missed day costs nothing.
• A day’s badge, and the Completed today mark on the home screen, follow the suit count selected right now. Win a day at 1 suit and switch to 4 suits and the badge goes — you have not won that day at 4 suits yet. Your totals do not drop.
• Statistics are kept per suit count: Deals played, Games won, Win rate, Fewest moves, Fastest clear. Daily records are split the same way, so a 1-suit result is never the bar a 4-suit attempt has to beat.
• Total play time and Daily deals won are the overall figures. Daily deals won counts dates — win one date at all 3 suit counts and it is still 1 day.

Your move count is shown while you play; no clock is. Time is recorded quietly and appears when you finish and in your statistics. There is no score of any kind — not the classic 500-point system, nothing that pays you for speed. Moves and time are the only two numbers, and neither of them hurries you.

Tips

• Turn face-down cards over first. 44 of them are hidden when the deal starts, and a column cannot really open up until its hidden cards are gone.
• Build in one suit even when a mixed stack would be legal. A mixed stack is a wall; a same-suit run is cargo. That is the difference between a table you can work and one you can only look at.
• An empty column is the most valuable thing on the table: it takes any card, so it is where you park a run that is burying the card you actually want. The cost is that the stock will not deal until it is filled again.
• Tidy up before you deal. A deal drops 1 card onto every column regardless of what is already there, and it will bury runs you spent moves building.
• Every rank appears 8 times in the 104 cards, so when a 7 will fit you often have a choice of which 7 — take the one whose suit matches what it is landing on.
• When you cannot see a move, look at Hint before you undo. It costs nothing, it does not touch the board, and it is usually pointing at a face-down card you had stopped noticing.

Questions people ask