Simple Simon Solitaire: a Spider cousin with every card on show

Simple Simon is a lovely introduction to the Spider family. It uses a single pack, deals every card face up, and has no stock at all, so there are no surprises waiting under the table. Your job is to sort the whole pack into four tidy runs, one per suit, from King down to Ace. The name suggests a children's game, but there is real thinking in it, and a well-played game of Simple Simon is very satisfying.

This page takes you through the layout, the rules as they work here, some friendly tips, and what we found when we tested thousands of deals, including one result we are still getting to the bottom of.

How Simple Simon is dealt

• One pack of 52 cards, every card face up.
• Ten columns in a staircase: the first three columns hold eight cards each, and the rest step down: seven, six, five, four, three, two and finally one card.
• No stock and no waste. All 52 cards are in the columns from the start.

How Simple Simon is played

Four suits, King down to Ace

Build four complete runs, one for each suit, from King down to Ace. When a column holds a full King-to-Ace run of a single suit, the run is removed from the table automatically. Remove all four and you have won.

Placing cards

• A card may go onto a card one rank higher in any suit: any 6 onto any 7.
• Any card, or any movable run, may be placed in an empty column.

Moving runs

• You can move a run of cards together only if the whole run is in the same suit, such as the 9, 8 and 7 of hearts.
• There is no limit on the length of a same-suit run you can move.
• A run that mixes suits cannot be moved as a group. Only its bottom card can move.

The key idea: build freely, but sort by suit

Simple Simon gives you two different freedoms that pull in different directions. You may place any card on any card one higher, whatever the suit. But you may only move a run if it is all one suit. A 7 of clubs on an 8 of hearts is a legal placement, but it glues the two cards together until you split them one by one.

So the whole art of the game is building in suit whenever you can, and building across suits only when it clearly helps. At the start of a typical deal there are very few same-suit links already in place: on average, 0.76 per deal in our testing. Nearly all the sorting is up to you.

Friendly tips

Begin at the short end of the staircase

The right-hand columns hold only a few cards. Clearing one gives you an empty column, which can take any card or run, and that is the most valuable space in the game.

Choose the matching suit when you can

When a card could go onto two different cards one rank higher, choose the one of its own suit. That keeps your runs movable later.

Use empty columns as sorting space

An empty column is perfect for untangling a mixed-suit stack. Move cards across one at a time, sorting as you go, then gather the same-suit runs back together.

Do not fill your last empty column lightly

Once every column is occupied, your options shrink sharply. Before you fill the last space, make sure the move is taking you somewhere.

Look at the whole board

With nothing hidden, you can plan several moves ahead. Find where the high cards of each suit sit, and work out which column is best placed to become each suit's home.

Check for a stuck start

Very occasionally, a deal offers no legal move at all at the start. If that happens, it is not you: start a new game.

How often can Simple Simon be won?

Because every card is face up, we used a solver, a program that sees exactly what you see and searches for a way to clear the table. We gave it a fixed amount of searching per deal and ran it on 3,000 numbered deals.

By our count, somewhere between 86.5% and 94.8% of deals can be won. Most games are winnable, so keep at it.

A result we are still looking into

We want to be open about something. A 2026 study by Blake and Gent in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research puts Simple Simon at 97.45% winnable. That implies no more than about 2.55% of deals are impossible. We prove more than that impossible: 5.2%, with a 95% range of 4.4% to 6.0%.

We checked our side carefully. Six of the deals our solver called impossible were re-checked by a separate brute-force search, written independently, and it agreed every time. One of our deals has no legal move at all in its opening position, so it is certainly lost. The rules we used, read from this site's game code, appear to match the rules in the published study. Our result differs from the published one and we have not yet found why. Until we do, please treat our Simple Simon figures with a little caution.

Simple Simon on solitaire-free.nz

Simple Simon is free on solitaire-free.nz and plays in any modern browser on a computer, tablet or phone, with nothing to download and no sign-up or email. Cards are large and clear, and a zoom control makes them bigger. Drag cards or tap a card and then its new spot. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are all on hand, your wins, time and moves are tracked, and you can switch off the sound, play fullscreen and choose a table colour.

Where our numbers come from, one step at a time

The solitaire-free.nz team ran this study in September 2026, using the rules of Simple Simon as played here.

1. We read the rules from the game code. Ten face-up columns of 8, 8, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 cards; building down in any suit; same-suit runs of any length can move; any card or run fills an empty column; completed King-to-Ace suits are removed automatically.
2. We turned those rules into a program that makes only legal moves.
3. We dealt 3,000 numbered games, each shuffled from a seed number so the test can be repeated card for card.
4. We used a solver. With every card face up, it knows nothing you do not. It searched up to 200,000 positions per deal.
5. We sorted each deal into solved, proven impossible or undecided.
6. We compared with published research and found the disagreement described above, which we have not resolved.
7. We double-checked our "impossible" verdicts on six deals with an independent brute-force search, which agreed each time.
8. We are clear about the limits. 8.3% of deals were undecided, and the gap with the published study is still open.

The nuts and bolts

The simulation is Python 3.11 with only the standard library. Simple Simon lives in spiderlike.py, which also covers Scorpion, since both belong to the Spider family. The solver is a best-first search: it keeps a queue of positions ranked by how close they look to a win, always expands the best one next, and keeps a set of positions already seen so none is searched twice. The independent check is a separate script, verify_simplesimon_bruteforce.py. A shared runner spreads the deals over the computer's processor cores with multiprocessing, and every deal is shuffled from its seed. The 95% ranges are Wilson score intervals.

Claude, an AI assistant from Anthropic, helped the team write and review the code and draft this page. The AI did not produce the figures. Each one comes from running the simulation, and we compared our results with published research before publishing, which is how we spotted the difference above.

By Admin, solitaire-free.nz. Study date: September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Is Simple Simon good for beginners?

Yes. It is easy to learn, with no stock and every card on show. Winning it well takes a bit more thought than the name suggests.

Can I move a run that mixes suits?

No. Only runs of a single suit can be moved together. Mixed runs have to be taken apart one card at a time.

What can go into an empty column?

Any card, or any same-suit run.

Are some Simple Simon deals hopeless?

No. By our count 5.2% of deals are impossible, and a few offer no move at all at the start. Most deals, at least 86.5%, can be won.

Where to go after Simple Simon?

Step up to Spider Solitaire for the two-pack original, or try Scorpion for a harder in-suit challenge. The full list is on our games page, and there is more on the blog.