Four Suit Spider Solitaire

Spider as it was meant to be played

Four-suit Spider is the full game and one of the hardest solitaires in common circulation. All four suits are dealt across two decks, and the same-suit grouping rule now applies everywhere: any card may sit on any card one rank higher, but only a same-suit sequence travels as a unit. With four suits in play, one careless stack can strand three suits at once.

Serious players treat it as a planning exercise more than a card game. Every placement is a commitment, every empty column is working capital, and the five stock deals arrive whether your board is ready or not.

• ✓Columns build downwards in rank; suit does not matter when you stack.
• ✓Only a same-suit sequence can be picked up as a group.
• ✓Finish a King-to-Ace run in one suit and it leaves the table.
• ✓The stock deals a card to every column — no column may be empty first.

How to actually win at four suits

1. 01

   Decide which suit you are building first

   Trying to advance four suits at once produces four half-built runs and no finished ones. Pick the suit with the most exposed high cards, drive it toward a complete run, and treat the other three as storage until it lands.

2. 02

   Treat every off-suit placement as a last resort

   With one legal parent per card, an off-suit stack does not merely delay a pair — it can remove the only home a third card had. Before placing off-suit, look for the empty column, the stock deal, or simply a different plan.

3. 03

   Bank two empty columns before the second deal

   One empty column lets you move a card. Two lets you disassemble an off-suit pair without a third space, which is the manoeuvre four-suit Spider demands constantly. Getting there early is worth sacrificing apparent progress.

4. 04

   Read the whole board before each deal

   Ten cards land at once and cannot be undone by tidiness afterwards. The question is never “can I deal?” but “which column will this ruin, and can I afford it?”

5. 05

   Undo aggressively, and without embarrassment

   Four-suit lines fail six moves after the mistake, not on it. Unlimited undo exists precisely so you can rewind to the fork and take the other branch — treating undo as cheating in this game means declining the only tool that makes it winnable.

Winnable even at full difficulty

The odds problem is what this table fixes. No solver can search four-suit Spider deeply enough to verify a shuffle, so most sites cannot promise their four-suit deals are winnable at all — some fraction of what they serve is lost before the first move. Deals here are constructed backwards from a completed board instead, so a winning sequence provably exists for every one.

That guarantee changes what a loss means. When a four-suit game slips away, the question is genuinely where your line went wrong. Build up through one suit and two suits if this page is ahead of you; Forty Thieves is the other two-deck test on the site.

Questions about this game

How rare are wins in four-suit Spider?

On random shuffles without undo, win rates in the low single digits are normal even for practised players. This site removes the unwinnable fraction entirely, since every deal is built from a solved game — so your win rate here measures your play rather than your luck.

Does the strategy differ from two suits, or is there simply more of it?

The principles are identical; the margins vanish. At four suits you can no longer repair loose habits mid-game, so same-suit joins, high off-suit placements and protected empty columns have to be there from the first move.

Is four-suit Spider harder than Forty Thieves?

They are hard in different ways. Forty Thieves punishes you slowly through one-card moves and a single stock pass; four-suit Spider punishes you suddenly, when a deal lands on a board that could not absorb it. Most players find Spider's failures more abrupt and Forty Thieves' more inevitable.