| A Patience game | |
| Named Variants | Gigantic Spider, Relaxed Spider, Spiderette, Spiderwort, Will o' the Wisp |
|---|---|
| Deck | Double 52-card |
| Family | Spider |
| See also Glossary of solitaire | |
Spider is a type of Patience game. It is one of the more popular two-deck solitaire games.
Contents |
The main purpose of the game is to remove all cards from the table, assembling them in the tableau before removing them. Initially, 54 cards are dealt to the tableau in ten piles, face down except for the top cards. The tableau piles build down by rank, and in-suit sequences can be moved together. The 50 remaining cards can be dealt to the tableau ten at a time when none of the piles are empty.
Spiderette is the one-deck version of Spider. This game should not be confused with Little Spider, which is played differently.
The first 28 cards are dealt the same way as in another popular solitaire game Klondike, i.e. the first column should have one face-up card, the second column should have one face-up card and one face down card at the bottom, and so on.
Cards in the tableau are built down regardless of suit. Only the top cards of each column can be moved; however, a sequence of cards that are in suit (such as 9-8-7-6♥) can be moved as one unit. Face-down cards that become exposed are turned face-up and empty column spaces on the tableau are filled by any card. If all possible plays have been made, a new set of seven cards (one for each column) are dealt, provided that each column must contain at least one card. After three such deals, and the game becomes stuck, the three left over cards are dealt on the first three columns.
Once a suit sequence of thirteen cards from king down to ace is successfully built, it is discarded from the game. The game is won when four such suit sequences were built and discarded this way.
The most common software version of Spider is the one included in the Vista, ME and XP versions of Microsoft Windows, Spider Solitaire. Spider Solitaire was introduced in the Microsoft Plus! 98 addition pack for Windows 98.[1]
On Unix operating systems, an early version was developed around 1989 at Sun Microsystems. A version of Spider Solitaire typically comes bundled with both the KDE and GNOME desktop environments on other Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD, under the names KPatience and Aisleriot Solitaire, respectively. Versions for Macintosh and most other operating systems are also available.
The Windows version offers three levels of difficulty, with one, two, or four suits. These play modes are equivalent to disregarding suit difference, either within the colors or altogether, and thus can be simulated in the physical card game, though the computer version aids visibility by representing all cards as spades and/or hearts.
Different software implementations of spider offer alternative scoring rules. The version from Sun Microsystems from 1989 defines the following rules in the manual: 10 points for each initially face down card that gets turned over; 15 additional points for each column where all the face-down cards have been turned over (even if you don't manage to get a space); 2 points for each card that is sitting atop the next higher card of the same suit; 50 points for each completed suit removed from the tableau (in which case you do not also score for the 12 cards sitting atop next higher cards). This yields a maximum score of 990. If you win the game with 4 or more completed suits still in the tableau, add 2 points for each suit after the first three. Thus winning with all eight suits still in the tableau yields a score of 1000.
In the Windows versions of Spider Solitaire, the scoring is calculated with a starting score of 500. One point is subtracted for each move; 100 points are added for each set removed. This gives a theoretical maximum of 1256 points. (No fewer than 44 moves are possible since there are that many cards to turn over.) Any game completed in under 100 moves (>1200 points) should be considered commendable.