Spider Solitaire — 4 Suits
Four-suit spider solitaire is two complete decks, ten columns and eight King-to-Ace runs to assemble, every one of them in a single suit. It is the hardest solitaire in common circulation: strong players clear somewhere around one deal in twenty, and every stock deal drops ten cards straight onto the sequences you spent the last ten minutes building.
4 suits. Two full decks. The hardest widely played solitaire: you need eight complete King-to-Ace suited runs and only 50 stock cards to buy relief.
Your statistics · 4 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
- Two full decks, 104 cards
- Tableau
- 10 columns
- Stock
- 50 cards, 5 deals of 10
- Published win rate
- around 1 in 20 for strong play
Why is 4-suit spider solitaire so hard?
Because the rule that lets you build and the rule that lets you move are different rules. You may place any card on a card one rank higher — so the board fills up quickly and looks productive — but only a same-suit sequence lifts as a unit. With four suits in play, roughly three quarters of every join you make is a mixed one, and a mixed join is a wall. The board looks tidy and is, in fact, welded shut.
The second problem is the stock. Fifty cards arrive in five blind batches of ten, one card onto every column, and they land on top of whatever you have. A batch dealt onto a well-ordered board is survivable; dealt onto a board that is already tangled it is usually fatal.
How do you actually win at 4 suits?
- Build in suit or do not build. A same-suit join is progress; a mixed join is a debt. Take the mixed one only when it turns over a face-down card, and count what it will cost to undo.
- An empty column is worth more than any single good move. It is a place to disassemble a mixed stack one card at a time, which is the only way mixed stacks ever come apart.
- Never deal from the stock while you have a same-suit join available. Every deal makes the board worse; spend all your free progress first.
- Aim to complete one run early rather than to tidy all ten columns. A completed run leaves the board permanently and takes thirteen cards of clutter with it.
- Use undo without guilt. The engine here keeps the full history, and four-suit spider is a game where a move you cannot see the consequences of is worth trying and taking back.
What win rate should you expect at 4-suit spider?
Low, and honestly so. The large solitaire sites that publish their players' figures report four-suit rates in the region of one deal in twenty, against roughly one in six at two suits and comfortably over half at one suit. Those are observed rates across all their players and not solver-derived bounds, so the precise number is soft. The shape is not: this is a game where losing is the normal outcome and clearing one is a genuine event.
Should you play 4 suits at all?
If you enjoy the losing, yes. If a one-in-twenty hit rate sounds like a chore, two suits has all the same decisions at a rate you can actually finish, and Forty Thieves offers a comparable difficulty with everything face up so a loss is provably your fault. There is no shame in the middle rung — it is where most experienced spider players live.
Spider Solitaire — 4 Suits questions people ask
- What is the hardest solitaire game?
- Among the games in wide circulation, 4-suit spider solitaire. Two decks, forty-four hidden cards, eight suited runs required, and fifty stock cards that arrive whether they help or not.
- How many suits are in 4-suit spider solitaire?
- All four — spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs — two complete decks' worth. That is what the name means: it is the full 104-card deal with no suits substituted out.
- Can every 4-suit spider deal be won?
- No, and unlike FreeCell nobody has run the exhaustive study that would say how many can. A meaningful fraction of deals are dead from the opening position regardless of how well you play.
- Does undo make 4-suit spider solitaire easier?
- Substantially, yes. Unlimited undo turns the blind stock deal from a gamble into an experiment. If you want the game as it plays with a physical deck, do not use it — but the option is there, and it is the difference between the game being hard and being unpleasant.
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.