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Spider (solitaire)

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Spider is a type of solitaire card game. It is one of the more popular two-deck solitaire games and, while difficult, the majority of games can be won. The game is also said to have been a particular favourite of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The object of the games is to remove all suits, 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.

Another Windows version of Spider is Arachnid Solitaire. A version of Spider Solitaire comes bundled with KDE for Linux. It is has been a part of Kdegames for some time. Versions for Macintosh and most other operating systems are also available.

There are several variants of spider, such as Relaxed Spider or Spiderette. The former doesn't require all spaces to be filled before redealing, while the latter is played with only one deck.

Spider Solitaire (Medium difficulty) at the beginning of a game.
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Spider Solitaire (Medium difficulty) at the beginning of a game.

Windows Spider

Recent versions of Microsoft Windows (Windows Millennium, XP and beyond) contain the Microsoft version of Spider. This version allows play with one, two, or four suits.

Cheats

The statistics can be manipulated by directly editing the registry values HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Microsoft\Spider or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Spider
Two-suit Spider Solitaire in the middle of a game.
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Two-suit Spider Solitaire in the middle of a game.

Scoring

A player's score for a successfully completed game is calculated by subtracting the number of moves from 1300. Thus, a game requiring 100 moves to complete would result in a score of 1200. A game perfectly played with no wasted moves would result in a score of 1204 (96 moves). This is determined by taking the number of cards (104) and subtracting the number of Kings (8), since Kings are found at the top of a sequence.

Examples of wasted moves:

  1. Moving a King.
  2. Creating an empty pile before the last deal.
  3. Moving a card that is already in sequence.
However, games requiring less than 96 moves to complete have been achieved. This can occur during the five deals when a card lands by luck in proper sequence (e.g. a 2 lands on a 3), saving the player a move.

See also

External links

 


From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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