Spider Solitaire — 2 Suits
Two-suit spider solitaire deals four sets each of spades and hearts. You can still stack any card on a card one rank higher, but only a same-suit sequence travels as a unit — put a red 7 on a black 8 and the two of them are stuck together until you move the 7 away on its own. That single restriction is the entire difficulty of the game.
2 suits. Four sets each of spades and hearts. You can still stack any card on a card one rank higher, but only same-suit sequences travel together — mixed stacks freeze.
Your statistics · 2 suits
- Played
- 0
- Won
- 0
- Win rate
- 0%
- Streak
- 0
- Best streak
- 0
- Best time
- —
Kept in this browser, on this device only. Abandoning a deal in progress counts as a loss, so the win rate means something.
Today’s deal
Everyone playing Spider Solitaire today gets deal #4136628247. It changes at midnight UTC.
Track the month on the daily challenge page.
Replay a deal
Every deal is a pure function of its number, so deal #20260726 is the same shuffle on any device, any time.
Keyboard
- U / Z
- Undo
- R
- Redo
- H
- Hint
- N
- New deal (asks first)
- F
- Full screen
- Space
- Turn the stock
- Esc
- Deselect, or leave full screen
- Deck
- 4 × spades + 4 × hearts, 104 cards
- Tableau
- 10 columns
- Stock
- 50 cards, 5 deals of 10
- Published win rate
- around 1 in 6 for strong play
What is the difference between 1-suit and 2-suit spider solitaire?
One rule, applied constantly. In both games you may place any card on a card one rank higher — that never changes. What changes is which cards move together. A run only lifts as a unit if it is all one suit, so in the two-suit game a descending 10-9-8 made of spade, heart, spade is three separate one-card moves, each of which needs its own destination. In the one-suit game it is a single drag.
| Column ends | 1 suit | 2 suits |
|---|---|---|
| ♠9 ♠8 ♠7 | Moves as one run | Moves as one run |
| ♠9 ♥8 ♠7 | Cannot occur | Only the ♠7 moves |
| ♥J ♥10 ♠9 ♠8 | Cannot occur | ♠9 ♠8 move; the ♥J ♥10 stay |
How do you win 2-suit spider solitaire?
By refusing to build mixed stacks unless you have to. Every time you drop a heart on a spade you have created a join you will have to unpick later, and unpicking needs somewhere to put the top half. The players who clear this game consistently are the ones who take the worse-looking move — leaving a card in place rather than making a mixed stack — because they are counting the moves needed to undo it.
- Empty a column early and treat it as a workspace, not as a place to dump a King.
- Before you make a mixed join, ask where the top card goes when you need it back. If the answer is nowhere, do not make the join.
- Keep one suit's sequences together on the left and the other's on the right where you can. It costs nothing and it prevents accidental joins.
- Deal from the stock when your position stops improving, not when you run out of moves — the ten new cards are far more useful landing on a tidy board.
Is 2-suit spider solitaire winnable?
Yes, but not often. Published figures from the largest solitaire sites put strong-player win rates on two suits in the region of one deal in six, against well over half for one suit and something near one in twenty for four. Those are observed player rates rather than solver results, so treat them as a ranking rather than a measurement — but the ranking is not in dispute, and it is why this rung is where most regular spider players settle.
Which two suits are used?
Spades and hearts here — one black and one red, so the two suits are distinguishable at a glance even at phone-sized cards. Some implementations use spades and diamonds, or two black suits. It makes no difference to the rules: what matters is that there are exactly two of them, four sets each.
Spider Solitaire — 2 Suits questions people ask
- Why can't I move my whole sequence in 2-suit spider solitaire?
- Because it is not all one suit. Only same-suit descending sequences travel as a unit. A 10-9-8 of mixed suits has to be moved one card at a time, and each of those cards needs a legal landing spot of its own.
- How many cards are in 2-suit spider solitaire?
- 104: four complete sets of spades and four of hearts. Fifty-four are dealt into ten columns at the start and fifty stay in the stock, dealt ten at a time.
- Is 2-suit spider solitaire harder than FreeCell?
- Much harder. Nearly every FreeCell deal is winnable from the opening position and everything is visible from the start; two-suit spider hides forty-four cards and hands you fifty more in blind batches of ten.
- Can you undo in 2-suit spider solitaire?
- Yes, without limit, and the whole deal is a pure function of its number so you can replay the identical shuffle as often as you like. Both are on this page.
The full rules of spider solitaire
This page is one rule set. The complete rules, with worked examples and the questions beginners actually ask, are on how to play spider solitaire, and every rule set is switchable on the main spider solitaire page.