Spider Solitaire with Four Suits
Spider Solitaire 4 Suits is the full game: two ordinary 52-card decks, 26 cards of each suit, and only two copies of any card. It is the hardest of the three levels, called Difficult in Windows XP and Advanced in Windows Vista and 7. You are playing it above. To learn the moves first, try one-suit Spider or two-suit Spider.
Why Four Suits Is the Hardest Level
A pile moves as a unit only when it is all one suit, and at four suits a card matches the suit of a given card one rank higher only one time in four. Most joins you make are off-suit, so most piles turn mixed, and a mixed pile moves one piece at a time.
Repairs are harder too. Every card has exactly one twin in the deck. If you need a 7 of clubs to fix a pile and one is buried under five face-down cards, the other copy is the only one left, and it may still be in the stock.
How a Four-Suit Game Is Dealt
44 of the 54 cards on the table start face down: five under the top card in each of the first four columns, and four under it in each of the other six. With only two copies of each card, the one you need may be hidden in a column or still in the stock, so turning cards over matters more here than at any other level. The other 50 cards arrive ten at a time, one on every column, and never while a column is empty.
You need eight runs from King down to Ace, two in each suit. Every finished run scores 100 points as it leaves the table.
Four-Suit Strategy
Win a second empty column. One empty column lets you carry a pile of two pieces; two let you carry four, as in the pile above. Empty one column, use it to empty another, and check the whole table for another way before you give either up.
Save your last space for work, not Kings. Parking a King in your only empty column turns up one card but ties the column up until that King's run of 13 is complete. Swaps and carries need the space first; hand it to a King when you have a spare.
Count the sure flips in the opening. Before your first move, count how many face-down cards you can be certain of turning using only the cards you can see. Mathematician Trevor Tao's simulations put the average opening at about four. In the deal shown above, Queen of diamonds to King of hearts, Jack of spades to Queen, 4 of clubs to 5 of diamonds, 3 of spades to 4, 2 of hearts to 3, and an 8 to the 9 of spades give six, made in that order.
Keep the mess in one place, and build high. Off-suit joins are unavoidable here. Keep them to one or two columns and make them high in rank, where a pile still has a long ladder below it.
Prepare, then deal. Make every flip, same-suit join, and swap you can, choose what fills each empty column, and only then take the next ten cards. With no undo, a deal made too early cannot be taken back.
How Often Can You Win at Four Suits?
Nearly every four-suit deal can be won by someone who knows where every card is. One solver project, playing the same no-deal-onto-an-empty-column rule as our game, solved 31,998 of 32,000 deals and left the other two unresolved. You cannot see the 44 face-down cards or the 50 in the stock, so the question that matters is how well a person does.
The strongest documented results for play without undo, which is how our game works, come from two players. Steve N. Brown, author of a book on four-suit strategy, reports winning 48.7 percent of 306 games. Trevor Tao, building on Brown's methods, reports 59 wins in 100 games on one site and 46 in 100 on another. Win rates published by play sites mix every level of player and allow undo, so they say little about a game where every move is final.
Spider Solitaire 4 Suits FAQ
Is 4 suit Spider Solitaire winnable?
Often, but far from always, for a person. Expert players without undo report 46 to 59 wins per 100 four-suit games. The deals themselves are rarely hopeless: a solver that could see every card solved 31,998 of 32,000. The gap is the hidden cards, which you have to turn over to learn.
How do you win Spider Solitaire with 4 suits?
Turn face-down cards first, win two empty columns and hand them back after each use, and never spend your last space on a King. Build in suit whenever you can, and keep off-suit piles to one or two columns. Before each deal, make every flip and repair you can, because the deal will bury them.
How many decks are used in 4 suit Spider Solitaire?
Two standard 52-card decks, 104 cards. Every card appears twice, so there are two Kings of spades and two 7s of hearts, and you build two King-to-Ace runs in each suit. The one-suit and two-suit levels also use 104 cards, drawn from fewer suits.
Try Another Level
For the complete rules, the scoring, and deeper Spider strategy, see the main guides, or warm up on an easier level.