The Origins and Evolution of Spider Solitaire

Spider Solitaire has been in print since at least 1937, and Microsoft turned it into one of the most-played computer games after 1998. Nobody is credited with inventing it, and nobody recorded why it is called Spider.

Early Origins of Solitaire Games

Patience games are probably German or Scandinavian in origin. The earliest dependable date for one is about 1758, and the first description in a games anthology appeared in a German collection late in the 18th century; sources disagree on whether the 1783 or the 1791 edition carried it. Swedish references follow from 1808, and the oldest known book devoted to patience games was published in Moscow in 1826.

The French call these games réussite, meaning success. "Patience" was the original English name on both sides of the Atlantic; "solitaire" became the usual North American word in the 20th century, while Britain still says patience.

The Emergence of Spider

The earliest known description of Spider is an uncredited article in the November 1937 issue of Games Digest, a magazine edited by the bridge expert Ely Culbertson. It already treats Spider as a well-known game, but deals it differently from today: 50 cards to start, and a last stock deal of only four cards. Somerset Maugham mentioned trying "the Spider" in his 1930 travel book The Gentleman in the Parlour, though older books also describe an unrelated game of that name.

Albert H. Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith's The Complete Book of Solitaire and Patience Games (1949) is the earliest known source with today's layout: 54 cards in ten piles, a row of ten dealt from the stock only once every space is filled, and each completed suit discarded. They rated a game at about 20 minutes and a player's chance of winning at one in three. They also coined names for two relatives, Spiderette and Scorpion, to mark the family link.

No early source explains the name. The popular explanation, that the eight completed suits match a spider's eight legs, has no early source, and the 1949 rules have no foundation piles at all.

Spider in the Pre-Computer Era

Spider needs two decks and room for ten columns, a bigger commitment than a one-deck game like Klondike. It still ran through the card books of the century: Albert Ostrow's The Complete Card Player (1945), Alphonse Moyse's 150 Ways to Play Solitaire (1950), which reported that its devotees ranked it the king of solitaires, and George Hervey's books of the 1960s and 1970s.

Morehead and Mott-Smith wrote in 1949 that Franklin D. Roosevelt was a devotee of Spider. The story traces back to a magazine report nobody has since located, so it is reported rather than proven. Hervey went as far as proposing to rename the game "Roosevelt's Favourite".

The Windows Revolution

Spider reached computers before Microsoft. Donald R. Woods wrote a version at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab that was later ported to Sun workstations, whose documentation is dated 1989, and several independent Spider programs for Windows appeared between 1991 and 1993.

Microsoft first released Spider Solitaire in Microsoft Plus! 98, a paid add-on for Windows 98, on 25 June 1998. That version had no difficulty setting. Windows Me brought Spider into Windows itself in 2000 and added the choice of suits: Easy with one suit, Medium with two, and Difficult with four. It is the earliest suit choice we can document. Windows XP followed in 2001, and Windows Vista renamed the levels Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.

Klondike had shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990, partly to teach people to use a mouse. Spider found the same audience: one book on casual game design reports it as the most-played game on Windows PCs by 2005.

The Modern Era

From Windows 8 in 2012, Spider moved into the Microsoft Solitaire Collection with Klondike, FreeCell, Pyramid, and TriPeaks, plus daily challenges. The Collection reached iOS and Android in November 2016.

Spider has also drawn mathematicians. A 2011 paper by Jesse Stern argues that a generalised Spider, with every card visible, is NP-complete, and solver studies have since found that nearly every four-suit deal can be won by a player who knows where every card lies.

You can play all three suit levels here, free: 1 suit, 2 suits or 4 suits.

Key Milestones

• 1930Somerset Maugham mentions trying "the Spider" in his travel book The Gentleman in the Parlour, possibly a different game
• 1937Games Digest prints the earliest known description of Spider
• 1949Morehead and Mott-Smith print the 54-card layout still used today
• 1989Sun documents Donald R. Woods' computer version of Spider
• 1990Microsoft bundles Klondike Solitaire with Windows 3.0
• 1998Microsoft releases Spider in Microsoft Plus! 98 on 25 June
• 2000Windows Me includes Spider and adds the 1, 2, and 4 suit levels
• 2001Windows XP ships with Spider
• 2012Spider moves into the Microsoft Solitaire Collection with Windows 8
• 2016The Microsoft Solitaire Collection reaches iOS and Android