Spider Solitaire 4 Suits: the full game, explained simply

Spider Solitaire 4 Suits is the toughest, most satisfying member of the Spider family. You get two full decks shuffled together — 104 cards, all four suits in play — and one job: build eight complete runs from King down to Ace, each one in a single suit, and clear them off the table.

It is a thinking game rather than a lucky one. Nothing is hidden behind a timer, nothing is rushed, and every move you make either opens the board up or quietly closes it down. That is the whole pleasure of it.

You can play it right here, free, with no ads and no sign-up. Nothing to download, nothing to install, no email address, no account. Just open the page and deal.

The rules, in plain language

The layout

• Two decks: 104 cards, no jokers.
• Ten columns (the tableau) are dealt at the start: 54 cards in total. The first four columns get six cards each, the other six columns get five cards each. Only the bottom card of each column is face up.
• The stock: the remaining 50 cards sit in the corner, ready to be dealt in five rounds of ten.
• No foundations to fill by hand. When a full King-to-Ace run in one suit is completed, it lifts off the table automatically.

How cards move

• You may place any card onto a card one rank higher, regardless of suit. A 7 of hearts can go on an 8 of clubs.
• You may move a group of cards together only if they are in descending order and all the same suit — for example 10-9-8 of spades.
• Mixed-suit sequences cannot be moved as a block. That single rule is what makes four suits hard.
• An empty column accepts any card or any valid same-suit group. Empty columns are your most valuable asset.
• When you uncover a face-down card, it turns over straight away.
• Aces are low, and nothing sits on an Ace.

Dealing from the stock

Tap the stock and one card lands on top of every column — all ten at once, wherever they fall. This is the moment that wrecks careful work, so the rule to remember is simple: you cannot deal while any column is empty. Tidy up first.

Winning

Complete all eight suited runs (King down to Ace) and the table empties. That is the win. If you run out of legal moves with cards still on the table and the stock exhausted, that deal is done — use Restart or take a fresh deal.

How the game plays on this site

Everything here is built for comfortable, unhurried play, and every feature is available to everyone — there is no paid version, because there is no payment.

• Large, clear cards and readable text, kind on tired eyes, with a zoom control to make the board bigger.
• Hint when you cannot see a move, and unlimited Undo so a wrong turn costs you nothing.
• Restart to replay the same deal, and Auto Play to finish off a game once it is clearly solved.
• Drag and drop, or simply tap to move cards — whichever suits your hand and your device.
• Wins, time and moves are tracked for your current game if you like a benchmark.
• Sound can be switched off, and there is fullscreen mode plus table colour settings.
• Any modern browser, on desktop, tablet or phone.
• No gambling, no in-app purchases, no countdown pushing you along. It exists for enjoyment, nothing else.

New to Spider? Start gentler with one-suit Spider, then step up to Spider Solitaire 2 Suits before coming back here. If you would rather a classic, try Klondike Draw 3, or browse all our games.

Strategy that actually works

1. Turn face-down cards over first

Information beats tidiness. Between two moves of similar value, choose the one that flips a hidden card. Every card revealed is a new option for the rest of the game.

2. Chase an empty column early

An empty column is a workbench: you can park an awkward card there, unpick a mixed pile, or rebuild a run in order. The columns that started with five cards are usually your best candidates. One empty column changes a losing board into a playable one.

3. Respect suit breaks

Putting a 9 of diamonds on a 10 of clubs is legal, but it creates a suit break — a join you will later have to undo one card at a time. Make the move if it flips a card or clears a column. Avoid it when it only shuffles cards sideways.

4. Keep a King column and build downwards

Kings never move onto anything, so a King at the head of a column is a natural home for a long suited run. Feed one column deliberately rather than starting eight half-runs at once.

5. Run a quick check before every deal

1. Have I flipped every card I can?
2. Have I joined every same-suit pair available?
3. Are all columns non-empty (so the deal is legal) but not dangerously tall?
4. Is there a move I will regret once ten new cards land?

6. Use Undo as a planning tool

Undo is not a crutch here, it is a way to test an idea. Try a line, see where it leads, step back if it sours. That is exactly how strong players learn a variant this hard.

Common mistakes

• Dealing too soon. Most lost games are lost by hitting the stock while easy work remains.
• Filling an empty column immediately. Leave it open as long as you safely can.
• Burying low cards. A 2 or 3 stranded under a tall mixed pile can sink an otherwise good board.
• Growing every column evenly. Spread effort thin and you finish with ten messy piles and no moves.
• Ignoring Hint when genuinely stuck. It often shows a suited join hiding in plain sight.

What the research actually says

We only quote figures we can point you to.

• Skilled four-suit play wins roughly half the time. The mathematics magazine Plus (plus.maths.org), in its article on Spider solitaire, cites Steve N. Brown’s book Spider Solitaire Winning Strategies, which reports a win rate of 48.7% over 306 games at the four-suit level, played “pure” — no undo, no restarts, no rejected deals. So four suits is hard, but far from hopeless.
• Spider is genuinely, mathematically complex. A generalised version of Spider Solitaire has been shown to be NP-complete in a paper by Jesse Stern, “Spider Solitaire is NP-Complete”. In plain terms: there is no known quick formula that solves every position — you have to reason it out, which is why the game stays interesting.
• For comparison, Klondike has been measured precisely. Using their Solvitaire solver, Charlie Blake and Ian Gent report the winnability of “thoughtful” Klondike (where all card positions are known) as 81.945% ± 0.084%, in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. It is a useful reminder of how much easier one deck is than two.
• Solitaire helped invent a branch of maths. As the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases recounts in its note on Markov chain Monte Carlo, Stanislaw Ulam devised the Monte Carlo method after deciding it was easier to deal out a hundred games of solitaire and count the wins than to calculate the odds.

One other piece of history worth knowing: Spider reached millions of households because Microsoft bundled it with Windows in the late 1990s, which is how a great many New Zealanders first met the game on a beige office computer.

Playing Spider 4 Suits in New Zealand

We do not publish player numbers, and we will not invent them — every figure above is sourced and linked. What we can say is how well this game suits life here.

It is an ideal winter game: long Southland evenings, rain on the roof in Wellington, a cuppa going cold beside the tablet. It is equally good at the bach over the Christmas break, or on the couch after the cricket. A four-suit deal rewards being taken slowly across two sittings — and because there are no timers, you can put it down mid-game and come back.

It also travels well on a phone, though the bigger the screen the better with 104 cards. If you are on a tablet, try fullscreen with the zoom nudged up a step.

Frequently asked questions

Is every Spider Solitaire 4 Suits deal winnable?

No. Some deals cannot be beaten however well you play, and there is no published, precise winnability figure for four-suit Spider that we can responsibly quote. What the research above does show is that around half of four-suit games fall to good technique, so a loss usually means there was a better line rather than an impossible board.

Do I need to download anything or create an account?

No. No download, no install, no sign-up, no email. It runs in your browser on desktop, tablet and phone, and it is completely free with no ads, no pop-ups and no paywalls.

Is using Hint, Undo or Auto Play cheating?

Not here. There is no scoreboard to protect and nothing to win but your own satisfaction. Use Hint to learn to spot moves, Undo to test plans, and Auto Play to skip the tidying once the win is certain.

How is this different from one-suit and two-suit Spider?

The rules are identical; only the number of suits changes. With one suit every descending sequence can be moved as a block, so the game flows. With four suits you can only shift same-suit runs, so the board locks up quickly. Many players warm up on two suits before tackling four.

Why can’t I deal from the stock?

Because a column is empty. Fill it — ideally with a King or a useful suited run — and the deal becomes available.

Can I make the cards bigger?

Yes. There is a zoom control for the board, plus fullscreen mode and table colour settings, and the cards and text are large and clear to begin with. Sound can be switched off entirely.

What happens to my statistics and information?

Wins, time and moves are tracked for your current game as a simple record of how you are going. For details on information handling, see our privacy page.

Any final tip before I start?

Flip cards, protect one empty column, avoid needless suit breaks, and never deal in a hurry. Then take a fresh deal — there is always another one waiting, and it costs nothing. More ideas live on our blog.