Spider Solitaire

Two decks, ten columns, and eight complete runs to get out. Most of the board is face down, which is the whole game. No advertisements, no account, no timer counting against you.

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How it is played

You are dealt fifty-four cards into ten columns, and only the card at the foot of each column is showing. Everything else is face down. You build downward in rank, and when a run from King to Ace is complete in a single suit it leaves the table. Clear all eight and you have won.

When you are stuck, the stock deals another row across every column. It will do that five times and then it is finished, so a row dealt onto an untidy board is usually the move that ends the game.

Cards in play	104
Columns	10
Cards dealt to start	54
Of those, face down	44
Held in the stock	50
Complete runs needed to win	8

The suit count is the difficulty

This is the dial that matters, and it changes the rules rather than the decoration. A run only moves as a unit when every card in it shares a suit, so the number of suits on the table decides how much of the board you can actually pick up.

One suit: Every card is a spade, eight of each rank. Any descending run can be moved whole. This is where to learn the shape of the game.
Two suits: Spades and hearts. Runs break where the colour changes, and you start having to plan which pile you are willing to spoil.
Four suits: The full pack, twice over. Almost nothing moves as a unit, and the game earns its reputation. Most people lose most of these, which is the point.

A hint that tells you the truth

Spider hides cards in plain sight: a face-down card sits in the same column as a face-up one, a single position away. It would be easy to write a hint that quietly reads them. Ours does not, and that is enforced rather than promised. A test replaces the contents of every face-down card and the entire stock, and requires the advice not to change by so much as a word.

It also says when there is nothing worth doing. The hint only names a move that leaves the board genuinely better, so it will never walk you into shuffling one card back and forth. When no move makes progress it says so and names none. It tells you what makes progress, not what is best, because nothing here pretends to have solved your deal.

The deal was fixed before you saw it

Before the first card appears, the app records a fingerprint of the shuffle. When the game is over it shows you the seed that produced that fingerprint, so you can check the deal was settled in advance and not quietly adjusted while you played.

Being able to verify a deal is not the same as being promised a winnable one. Spider deals here are honest, not curated: some of them cannot be won, particularly at four suits, and we would rather say that than sell you a guarantee we do not make.

The small things

Undo goes all the way back, and undoing a deal from the stock puts those cards back where they were.
A four-colour deck and a large-print card face are both in Settings. Either one changes every card in every game, and neither changes how anything is played.
Your record stays on your device. Wins, streaks and settings are never uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload them to.
Hints step aside when they should. At expert difficulty and in tournaments there is no hint button at all, rather than one that is greyed out.

What you will not find

No advertisements at any point. No account, no email, no sign-up. No timer, no energy, no coins, no daily streak pestering you to come back. Spider is free and stays free, and the games that are not free are one payment rather than a subscription.

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