Introduction: Spider Solitaire is probably the most popular and fun solitaire card game being played today. It is easy to learn and requires lots of strategy.
Goal: Build up all cards in sequence, from ace to king, on eight of the ten tableau piles.
Time: About 25 minutes
Wins: Often
Decks: Eight Decks of spades only (104 cards)
Layout: After shuffling, deal out 52 cards to ten tableau columns. There will be six cards in the four left-most tableau piles, and five cards in each of the rest. The top card in each column is face-up and all other cards are face-down. The rest of the deck is placed in the stock pile. As you can see in this initial Spider Solitaire layout, this card game requires a lot of room.
Play: The goal in Spider Solitaire is to build eight of the tableau piles in suit from king down to ace (King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, Ace). There are no foundation piles, so all building is done on the tableau. Your ultimate goal is to build down from kings to aces.
The face-up cards on the tableau are available for play. In order to build down the tableau, you need to uncover the face-down cards in the tableau, to get them into play. You do this by moving tableau cards onto other columns in the tableau. When a face-down card is uncovered, by moving the card on top of it to another column, that face-down card is flipped and turned face-up. This newly flipped card is now available for play.
The high card is a king and the low card is an ace, so a king may not be placed on an ace in Spider Solitaire. Cards in sequence on a column in the tableau may be moved as a unit onto a gap in the tableau, or onto another column of the tableau, but only if they continue in sequence.
When no more moves can be made on the tableau, a card is dealt from the stock pile onto each of the tableau columns, face-up. Any gap created by moving all cards from one column may be filled with any available card or valid sequence. Creating a gap, and getting the face-down cards uncovered and available for play is usually a good move in Spider Solitaire.
Continue playing in this manner. Move cards from the tableau to other columns in the tableau, trying to uncover face-down tableau cards and making them available for play. When the stock pile is empty, no more redeals are allowed.
Gaps: Gaps in the tableau in Spider Solitaire are made when all of the cards are moved out of a column of the tableau. When this happens, the gap may be filled with any available card or valid sequence (i.e., cards in sequence only).
Redeals: In Spider Solitaire, there no redeals allowed.