Four suits is the classic brain-buster
Four-suit Spider is the version most people mean when they say the game is cruel. Two decks, four suits, ten columns, and a tableau that loves to glue itself shut. You may still build downward on any rank, but movable runs must be suited end to end — and suited ends are scarce.
This page exists so searchers who want the hard table land on hard-table guidance, the same way classic solitaire sites split one-, two-, and four-suit Spider into separate URLs.
Rules recap for the hard table
Deal, build, lift, and stock rules match the other Spider tables. The difficulty is combinatorial: every off-suit six-on-seven you accept becomes future labour. Empty columns are not luxuries; they are the only practical way to unpack a mixed tower and recover a suited spine.
Before you deal from stock, ask three questions: Can I reveal one more card? Can I create or keep an empty column? Am I about to cover the only landing rank I still need?
Reading the tableau: counting scarce ranks
Four-suit Spider uses two full decks, so there are eight copies of every rank on the table — but only two of any single suited rank, such as two black nines split between clubs and spades. Once you have watched three of the four black nines go by, buried under other cards, the fourth becomes precious: it may be your only remaining same-suit landing for a black ten.
This is the habit that separates strong four-suit play from guesswork. As columns fill up, glance at which ranks are already committed to deep, hard-to-reach positions. A card you are about to bury might be the last accessible copy of a rank another column needs. When you have a choice between two legal destinations and no reveal is at stake, send the card to the column where it is less likely to be needed again soon, not simply the nearest legal square.
A worked example: fighting for the first empty column
Suppose two columns are each three or four cards from being empty, but neither can clear on its own — column A has a lone club four sitting on a mixed diamond-and-heart stack, and column B has a similar mismatched trio. Beginners often try to empty whichever column looks shorter and stall halfway.
The stronger plan borrows space instead of fighting one column in isolation. Move column B's top suited pair onto a matching rank elsewhere on the board — even if that destination is not itself close to empty — then use B's remaining single card to clear a landing spot for column A's mismatched cards. You are temporarily using a third, unrelated column as a staging area. Once column A empties, you have real leverage: a genuinely free column, not just a shorter pile.
This kind of three-column shuffle is common in four-suit Spider and rare in the easier modes, because with only two suits in the deck a same-suit landing is usually one column away. With four suits in play, it is often three or four columns away, so borrowing space becomes routine rather than exceptional.
Rescue habits when the board locks
- Stop dealing. Exhaust every suited transfer first — including transfers that require moving a card twice through an intermediate column.
- Spend an empty column to peel a mixed stack, then rebuild with same-suit preference rather than refilling the column with the first legal card.
- If two empty columns appear at once, you often have enough leverage to reverse a bad opening — use them together before the next stock row arrives, since a single deal can consume both.
- Recount scarce ranks before committing an empty column to a king. A king parked early is a column lost for the rest of the game unless you plan around it.
- If the stock is gone and no suited path remains, restart without guilt. Impossible deals are real, and four-suit Spider produces them more often than any other Spider mode on this table.
Knowing when to walk away
Four-suit Spider rewards patience with the current deal, but it also rewards patience with your own time. Some layouts lock within the first two stock rows because the suits needed to unpack an early mixed tower are already buried under it — no sequence of moves recovers them. There is no shame in recognising this early rather than grinding through five stock deals hoping the position improves; it will not.
A rough signal worth trusting: if you cannot create a single empty column by the third stock deal, and every exposed card's same-suit landing is already buried, the deal is very likely unwinnable. Restarting at that point is not giving up — it is the same judgement a strong player uses to spend their next ten minutes on a deal that is actually solvable.
Naming and terminology
"Spider Solitaire" is the standard English name, with 4-suit mode being the hardest variant (also called "hard mode" in most commercial implementations). The four-suit version uses a dual deck (104 cards, all four suits in play), which is why same-suit runs are rarer and mixed-suit attachments dominate. The "winnability" question is specific to this mode — 4-suit Spider has a meaningfully high percentage of unsolvable deals compared to 1-suit or 2-suit. If a guide describes a solitaire with 104 cards and four suits, it's 4-suit Spider. If it mentions only two colours, it's the 2-suit variant covered elsewhere in this guide.
Softer doors nearby
New to Spider? Start on one-suit. Ready for real packing lessons without full chaos? Play two-suit Spider. Four suits will still be here when you want the long fight — free, quiet, and saved on this device.