Spider Solitaire, four suits: the long game
Four-suit Spider is the full version: 104 cards, all four suits, ten columns and a stock of fifty. Only runs in a single suit move as a group, and only a King-to-Ace run in one suit leaves the table. It is the Spider for an unhurried evening, not a five-minute break.
How long is it? The honest answer is that a game you win will be long, and wins are hard to come by. Our computer player, which never uses Undo and cannot see hidden cards, played 2,000 deals. It won 4 of them (0.2%), and on average it cleared just 0.05 runs per game. Those 4 wins took about 209 moves each, though with so few wins that average is rough.
Yet the deals themselves are not the problem. Researchers who could see every card found 98.487% of four-suit deals winnable. The gap between those two numbers is all about planning, patience and Undo.
Four-suit Spider at a glance
| What we measured | Four suits | Two suits | One suit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs cleared per game, out of 8 (our player) | 0.05 | 0.82 | 4.96 |
| Games with at least half the runs cleared | 0.2% | 6.3% | 56.9% |
| Moves in a won game, including deals | about 209 (only 4 wins) | 154.6 | 117.5 |
| Games won by our player | 0.2% (95% range 0.08–0.51%) | 5.7% | 52.8% |
| Deals winnable with every card known | 98.487% (Blake & Gent, 2026) | not published | not published |
| Games our player played | 2,000 | 4,000 | 4,000 |
Each extra suit adds a chunk of moves to a win and takes a big bite out of how much gets done. Real players on solitairex.io put four-suit Spider in their hardest group, with win rates of 11% or less.
The four-suit rules
- Deal. Ten columns: four of six cards and six of five, the bottom card of each face up. Fifty cards in the stock.
- Stock. Five deals of one card per column. No redeal. A deal with an empty column on the table brings up a warning.
- Stacking. Any card goes on one rank higher, of any suit.
- Moving. Only an unbroken run in one suit moves as a group.
- Empty columns. Take any card or single-suit run.
- Clearing. A same-suit run from King to Ace lifts off by itself.
Pacing a four-suit game
Think in sessions, not minutes
A four-suit win runs to a couple of hundred moves. There is no timer here, so there is no reason to rush. Leave the tab open and come back to it.
Undo is the strategy
With 98.487% of deals winnable in theory, most lost games come from the order of moves, not from the cards. Try a line, and if it goes nowhere, undo and try another.
Chase same-suit stacks from the start
Every mixed stack is a knot you will need to untie later, and untying needs empty space you rarely have.
Hold on to empty columns
Our player emptied a column before the first deal in only 6 of 2,000 games. It won 2 of those 6. Small numbers, but early space clearly matters.
On any device
Four-suit Spider works in any modern browser on phone, tablet or computer. There is nothing to download and no account to set up. Tap or drag, zoom in for a better look at ten columns, and use Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play as much as you need. The game shows moves and time for the current deal. Mute the sound, switch to fullscreen or pick another table colour whenever you like.
What a four-suit session looks like
A four-suit game is really several sessions. The first is spent turning cards over and keeping stacks as clean as possible. The middle is a long period of sorting, where progress is measured in single same-suit runs coming together. The end, if you get there, is a rush of runs lifting off the table one after another.
Because the game saves your position in the browser, you do not have to finish in one go. Many players treat four-suit Spider as a game to come back to over an evening, a few rounds at a time.
The published research is the encouraging part: almost every deal can be won with the right moves. When a four-suit game goes badly, the cards are rarely to blame.
How we did the research, step by step
The solitaire-online.nz team ran this in September 2026. With four suits we wanted to show two things honestly: how hard the game is to play, and how often a deal can be won in principle.
- We began with this site's game code. 104 cards in four suits, ten columns, five deals of ten, no redeal, any card on one higher, only single-suit runs move, any card into an empty column. We assumed you cannot deal while a column is empty; the site shows a warning, but we did not test further.
- The game as a program. The same simulation we used for one and two suits, with four suits switched on.
- Numbered deals. 2,000 deals, each from a numbered seed from 100001 upwards.
- A computer player, and no solver. The player sees only face-up cards, never undoes, and searches 250 positions ahead before each move. At four suits it is very weak. We did not build a solver for four-suit Spider, so for the question "how many deals can be won" we rely on published research.
- The run. 2,000 games, each played to the end.
- The published ceiling. Blake & Gent, 2026 put four-suit Spider at 98.487% winnable, plus or minus 1.513%, when every card is known in advance.
- Error bars. A 95% range would catch the result 19 times in 20 on new deals. For our player's win rate it is 0.08% to 0.51%. The average move count for a win has a wide range because it rests on just 4 games.
- Limits. Our player's figures describe a no-Undo, no-look-ahead style of play, nothing more. They are not a measure of how winnable the game is, and they are not what a keen player achieves.
The technical side
The code is Python 3.11 with only the standard library. Four-suit Spider runs in spider.py, the same module as the other two versions. Before every move, the player explores up to 250 possible positions using the cards it can see, scoring them on same-suit links, empty columns and uncovered cards, with hidden cards counted against it. We tuned those scores on deals 1 to 30 and then measured on unseen deals. runner.py handed the 2,000 games to 19 worker processes, and the run took about three and a half minutes.
The error bars are Wilson score intervals. We used an AI assistant, Claude by Anthropic, to help write and review the code and draft the page. None of the figures come from the AI. They come from the program, or from the published study where we say so, and the team checked both before publishing.
By Admin, solitaire-online.nz. Study date: 18 September 2026.
Short answers before your next deal
How do I know if a four-suit game is going well?
Count your same-suit runs, not just your tidy stacks. A board full of neat stacks in mixed suits can still be stuck. If you can lift one or two runs off the table before the last deal, you are doing better than our player did in almost every game.
How long does a four-suit game take?
Our player's rare wins averaged about 209 moves. A person who explores and undoes will often take more. Plan on a long sitting.
Can most four-suit games be won?
In principle, yes: 98.487% of deals, according to published research that could see every card. In practice it takes a lot of care.
Why did your computer player do so badly?
It never undoes and cannot see hidden cards. Four suits punish exactly that kind of play.
Is it playable on a phone?
Yes. Zoom in and tap. Because a game is long, it helps to play where you can leave it open.
What's a good warm-up?
Two-suit Spider first. For something shorter on the same evening, try Pyramid or the games page.