Spider Solitaire, one suit: about 118 moves to clear the table

One-suit Spider is the relaxed end of the Spider family. You play with two packs' worth of cards, 104 in all, but every card is the same suit. Your job is to build eight full runs from King down to Ace in the columns. Each finished run lifts off the table by itself.

It is a satisfying game for a spare quarter of an hour, and we wanted to know how much of that time a win really takes. The solitaire-online.nz team gave 4,000 deals to a computer player that sees only the face-up cards and never uses Undo. It won 52.8% of them, and a winning game took 117.5 moves on average, counting each deal from the stock as a move.

Even when it lost, it rarely came away empty-handed: across all 4,000 games it cleared an average of 4.96 of the 8 runs.

One-suit Spider at a glance

Real players on solitairex.io do better than our computer player, which is what we would expect. People look ahead further, and they can undo.

How one-suit Spider works here

• Deal. Ten columns: the first four get six cards and the other six get five. Just the lowest card in each column starts face up.
• Stock. The other 50 cards wait in the stock. Each deal puts one card on every column, five deals in all. There is no redeal.
• Building. Any card can go on the card one rank higher. With one suit, every run you build is a proper run.
• Moving runs. You can move an in-order run of cards together.
• Empty columns. A cleared column takes a single card or a whole run.
• Clearing. A full run from King to Ace leaves the table automatically.
• Dealing with a gap. If a column is empty when you tap the stock, you will see a warning.

Getting a good game in fewer moves

Turn cards over before you tidy up

Every face-down card you turn over is a new choice. Our player scored a newly uncovered card highly and a hidden card as a cost, and that one habit did most of its winning.

An early empty column changes everything

In 52 of the 4,000 games our player managed to empty a column before the first deal from the stock. It won 51 of those 52. It does not happen often, but it is worth chasing.

Deal only when you have done what you can

Each deal drops a card on every column, including the neat ones. Use every useful move first.

Build long runs, not many short ones

One long King-to-Ace run leaves the table. Five scattered short ones just take up room.

Play on a phone, tablet or computer

Spider runs in any modern browser. There is nothing to download and no sign-up. Tap a card and then its destination, or drag it. Zoom makes the ten columns easier to read on a small screen. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are always on hand, and the game keeps count of your moves and time. You can mute the sound, go fullscreen and pick a table colour.

What a one-suit session looks like

A one-suit game has a steady rhythm. You work the ten columns until nothing useful is left, deal a row from the stock, and go again. There are five deals in all, so a game falls naturally into five rounds.

Early rounds are about turning cards over and making space. Middle rounds are where runs start to form and the first ones lift off the table. By the last deal, you are usually either clearing runs quickly or trying to squeeze room out of a crowded board.

Even in the games our player lost, it had cleared most of the table: on average 4.96 of the 8 runs across all games, and at least half the runs in 56.9% of them. So a one-suit game rarely feels wasted. There is almost always progress to show for it.

How we did the research, step by step

The solitaire-online.nz team ran this in September 2026 to find out how long a winning game of one-suit Spider takes and how much a typical game gets done.

1. Rules from this site's code. 104 cards in one suit, ten columns of 6 and 5, 50 cards dealt from the stock one per column, no redeal, any card on one higher, runs move together, any card into an empty column. We assumed the usual rule that you cannot deal while a column is empty; the site shows a warning at that point, but we did not test further in a browser.
2. The game as a program. We wrote those rules into a simulation, with spades as the single suit.
3. Numbered deals. 4,000 deals, each from a numbered seed starting at 100001. We used seeds 1 to 30 earlier to tune the player, so we kept them out of the results.
4. A computer player. It sees only the face-up cards, never uses Undo, and looks ahead up to 250 positions before each move. Its results show what steady play achieves, and a thoughtful person should do better.
5. The run. All 4,000 games played to the end, win or lose.
6. Comparisons. There is no published winnability figure for one-suit Spider. For four suits, Blake & Gent, 2026 found 98.487% of deals winnable when every card is known, and one suit is widely regarded as the easier game. Real players on solitairex.io win 70 to 84% of games in a group that includes one-suit Spider.
7. Error bars. A 95% range is the band that would catch the result 19 times out of 20 on a fresh set of deals. For moves in a won game it is 117.1 to 117.9.
8. Limits. Our player never undoes, so its win rate is well below what is possible. And the move count only covers games it won.

The technical side

The simulation is written in Python 3.11 with the standard library alone, in a module called spider.py. Before each move, the player runs a best-first look-ahead of up to 250 positions over the cards it can see, treating any newly uncovered card as unknown. It scores positions by same-suit links, empty columns and cards turned over, and counts hidden cards against itself. It fills empty columns before dealing, and deals when nothing improves the score. The shared runner.py spread the games across 19 worker processes, and the 4,000-game run took about 21 minutes.

The 95% ranges come from the Wilson score interval. Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, helped us build and check the Spider code and draft the text you are reading. It did not produce any of the numbers; they all come from running the program, and the team checked them before publishing.

By Admin, solitaire-online.nz. Study date: 18 September 2026.

Short answers before your next deal

How much of the table should I expect to clear?

Our player averaged 4.96 runs out of 8 per game, and cleared at least half the runs in 56.9% of games. If you regularly clear more than that, you are playing better than a no-Undo computer player, which is exactly what we would expect from a careful person.

How many moves does a game of one-suit Spider take?

Our computer player's wins averaged 117.5 moves, counting each deal from the stock. People who explore more and undo more will usually take a few extra.

Is one suit a good place to start?

It is the easiest Spider. Even our player, with no Undo, won just over half its games.

Why does the game warn me when I deal?

You have an empty column. Fill it first, then deal.

Can I play it on a phone?

Yes. Ten columns fit on a phone screen, and zoom helps if the cards feel small.

What comes next?

Try Spider with two suits, then four suits. Or have a look at Yukon on the games page.