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Spider Solitaire with four suits

By Gleb Tkatchouk · last updated 2026-09-18

Four-suit Spider is the original: two full decks, 104 cards in four suits, ten columns. It is the version the rules were written for and the one that earned Spider its reputation — a long, demanding game in which most deals are lost, not to bad luck, but to a decision made three deals of the stock earlier.

Four-suit Spider, the classic — honest about what it does not know. Free on the App Store.

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What changes with four suits

Every rule of Spider applies unchanged. What changes is that only one card in four matches the suit of the card you want to build on. Same-suit runs are rare and precious; mixed runs are the norm; empty columns are the only tool for untangling them, and there are never enough. A four-suit game is won by planning where each suit's run will be assembled and refusing moves that make that impossible.

Rules in brief

• Move a card, or a same-suit descending run, onto a card one rank higher of any suit, or into an empty column.
• Tap the stock to deal one card onto every column; not allowed while a column is empty.
• A complete same-suit run from king to ace leaves the table. Eight runs win.

What "winnable" means at four suits

Here we say plainly what most apps do not. Decks verifies one- and two-suit deals with a solver before dealing them. For four suits the solver cannot prove deals within a practical budget: in the last measurement it proved none of 50. So four-suit deals are dealt unchecked, from the full space of shuffles, and when you lose, the app says "solvability unknown" — never "unwinnable", because a search that ran out of time proves nothing. Some four-suit deals are genuinely impossible; nobody has a reliable figure for how many. The numbers for every other game are on Is every solitaire deal winnable?.

Strategy for four suits

1. Empty columns are the game. Everything else is preparation for getting one and using it well. Never fill an empty column casually.
2. Build same-suit runs from the king down, one suit per column where you can. A column that is "the spades column" is a column that will eventually clear.
3. Expose face-down cards before tidying. Forty-four cards start face down; the game is decided by how many you see before the stock runs out.
4. Count the stock. Five deals of ten. Each one buries every column. Know how many remain and what each will cost.
5. Accept that some deals are lost. In four-suit Spider a loss is not always a mistake. The deal code is there so you can decide whether it was.
6. Undo freely. Decks does not penalise undo, and four-suit Spider is a game of exploration.

Frequently asked questions

Is four-suit Spider the "real" Spider? It is the original form; one and two suits are later simplifications for learning.

What percentage of four-suit Spider games are winnable? Nobody has a reliable number. Our solver could not prove any of its sample within budget, which says as much about the solver as about the game.

Why does Decks not check four-suit deals? Because it cannot do so honestly within the time available, and a half-checked pool would be worse than an unchecked one.

How many cards are face down at the start? Forty-four of the fifty-four dealt.

Four-suit Spider, the classic — honest about what it does not know. Free on the App Store.

Scan with your phone to install