Spider (solitaire)
| A Patience game | |
| Named variants | Gigantic Spider, Relaxed Spider, Spiderette, Spiderwort, Will o' the Wisp |
|---|---|
| Family | Spider |
| Deck | Double 52-card |
| See also Glossary of solitaire | |
Spider is a type of Patience game. It is one of the more popular two-deck solitaire games.
The main purpose of the game is to remove all cards from the table, assembling them in the tableau before removing them. Initially, 54 cards are dealt to the tableau in ten piles, face down except for the top cards. The tableau piles build down by rank, and in-suit sequences can be moved together. The 50 remaining cards can be dealt to the tableau ten at a time when none of the piles are empty.
Common software versions of Spider are included with versions of Microsoft Windows Windows 7, Vista, ME and XP as Spider Solitaire. Spider Solitaire was introduced in the Microsoft Plus! 98 addition pack for Windows 98. There are 104 cards, enough to make 8 decks. The game comes in three versions: Easy (with 8 Spade packs), Medium (with four packs each of Spades and Hearts), and Hard (with two each of all four packs).
An earlier version was written for Windows 3.x in 1991 by John A. Junod, the original developer of WS_FTP. The final version was Windows Spider Solitaire version 92.01.04. He also wrote a DOS version called EGA-Spider with version up to 93.07.05. A similar game called Arachnid, was also written for Windows 3.x in 1991 by Ian Heath, a computer science professor at the University of Southampton in the UK. The latest known version is 1.2 and is quite well polished. This game was also re-written for 32-bit operating systems and is referred to as Arachnid 32.
On Unix operating systems, an early version was developed around 1989 at Sun Microsystems. A version of Spider Solitaire typically comes bundled with both the KDE and GNOME desktop environments on other Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD, under the names KPatience and AisleRiot Solitaire, respectively. Versions for Macintosh and most other operating systems are also available.
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Wikipedia