Spider Solitaire is a solo player solitaire game (also known as a patience card game).
The ultimate goal is to remove all of the cards from the table.
So how do you do that? You create a sequence of card of one suit from King down to the Ace. Once you have completed a sequence (and remember that they all have to be the same suit), that sequence of cards is immediately removed from the table. When you have removed all of the cards from the table, you win.
On the Spider Soli site, you can play at three difficulty levels: easy, normal, and hardcore.
Easy is best suited to casual gameplay and/or when you only have a few minutes to play. This is also the best mode for when you’re new to spider solitaire and just starting to learn the rules.
In easy mode, only one suit type is used (spades). This would be equivalent to playing a game of spider solitaire with real cards where you just ignore the suits and colors altogether.
At the easy level, any sequential card move is valid. For example, you can put a 7 of Spades onto an 8 of Spades. You could then move those two cards as a group onto a 9 of Spades.
On normal mode, things start to get trickier. The game is played with 2 suits now (spades and hearts) and strategy becomes much more important.
Let’s take a similar example to the easy game but modify it a bit. Let’s say that instead of 7, 8, and 9 all in Spades, you instead have:
If you did the same moves as were used in the easy game example, you’d get stuck. It would be a legal move for you to place the 7 of Spades onto the 8 of Hearts, but you would not be allowed to move the 7 and 8 together onto the 9. This is because cards that are not of the same suit, cannot be moved together.
Now, in this example, if you did things in a slightly different order, you could still end up with the 7, 8, and 9 all stacked together. First, you would move the 8 of Hearts onto the 9 of Spades, and then you would move the 7 of Spades onto the 8 of Hearts.
As opposed to the easy level, where any sequence of King down to Ace will clear that sequence from the table, on Normal and above, the sequence must be of the same suit for it to be cleared.
To clarify, you could still build a sequence from Kings down to Aces made up of different suits - those would be legal moves if done in the correct order so that you never have to move them as a group (since you’d be unable to do so) - it will just be of limited use to you because those cards will remain on the table (again, only cards of the same suit type will be immediately cleared when you complete a sequence of King to Ace).
This is where the game becomes a balancing act as you often will have to build stacks of varying suits of cards in order to uncover other cards, but just be careful not to dig yourself too deep of a hole.
Hardcore mode uses 4 different suits (spades, hearts, clubs, and diamonds). Play this mode for the biggest challenge (and the biggest headache!).
Traditional Spider Soli is a two-deck card game however there are a couple of variants that take this game to a new level:
At this time, neither of these variants have been implemented on this site.
In Spider Solitaire, you start with 10 piles of cards. As in many solitaire games, only the top card is visible (turned over). Moving the visible card to another pile means you get to turn the next face-down card up.
When you run out of moves, you can deal 10 new cards from the stock pile. A word of caution, most of the time, you will not be lucky enough for the new stock pile cards to be in sequence (e.g. a 4 from the stock lands on a 5 of the same suit) so make sure you’ve used all available moves before dealing from the from as the new cards will often “bury” your current cards.
Another note: Spider Soli uses the traditional rules that say no pile can be empty when you deal from the stock pile. Another variant, Relaxed Spider, does not have this rule. Relaxed Spider Solitaire will be implemented on this site sometime in the future.
If you’ve been looking for the CBS Spider Solitaire site, I hope you’ll find Spider Soli to be a worthy substitute!