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This awesome javascript library is what powers the animations, dragging, dialogs and other various things. |
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The cool charts in the Statistics dialog are made possible with PlotKit |
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Many of the decks come from other open source solitaire games or are in the public domain. Dondorf and Paris Ornamental (Nicu) Oxygen (KDE) Anglo-American (Aike Reyer) |
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BIG Thanks to: _kw, aav and _spec on #gamedev on Efnet |
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He is the one that came up with the idea and concept code for the winning 'explosion' animations. |
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His 'MurrinaBlackBlue' theme is what you see for checkboxes, radio buttons and the animation speed slider. |
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The favorite/bookmark icon, refresh and stop card graphics are from Tango.freedesktop.org |
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The Aptana IDE is my editor of choice for developing web sites.
PLAY MORE 42 SOLITAIRE GAMES |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Other | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Baker's Dozen | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | FreeCell | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Hard | |
| Type: | FreeCell | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Canfield | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Baker's Dozen | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Clock | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Forty Thieves | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Forty Thieves | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 2 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Klondike | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 2 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Klondike | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | FreeCell | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Flower Garden | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 2 | Time: | Long | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Forty Thieves | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | FreeCell | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Golf | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Golf | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Klondike | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Klondike | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Fan | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Montana | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Hard | |
| Type: | Pyramid | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Pyramid | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Pyramid | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Pyramid | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Yukon | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Spider | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | FreeCell | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Baker's Dozen | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 2 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Hard | |
| Type: | Spider | Skill: | High |
| No | Account | Score | Seconds | P/S |
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| No | Account | Score | Seconds | P/S |
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| Decks: | 2 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Spider | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 2 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Sultan | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Fan | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Fan | Skill: | High |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Medium | |
| Redeals: | 2 | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Fan | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Golf | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 1 | Time: | Short | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Golf | Skill: | Low |
| Decks: | 3 | Time: | Long | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Klondike | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 3 | Time: | Long | |
| Redeals: | Unlimited | Difficulty: | Easy | |
| Type: | Klondike | Skill: | Medium |
| Decks: | 3 | Time: | Long | |
| Redeals: | None | Difficulty: | Medium | |
| Type: | Yukon | Skill: | High |
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Spider is a classic multi-deck solitaire game that a lot of players find to be incredibly difficult. It’s also a personal favorite of mine. This article will cover my best play strategies for both the standard play modes and the Daily Challenges. THE SETTINGS Before I get started with the actual tips, as usual I want to draw your attention to the settings that are available in the game. A lot of people don’t know this, but during a game if you click on “Menu” and then “Game Options” (or press F5) you can change many of the game’s settings. The settings will differ based on which game you are in when you bring it up, and some of them are turned off if you’re in the middle of a Daily Challenge or Star Club challenge. In Spider, this menu lets you choose the number of suits in your deal. You can choose between the default 1-suit, the more difficult 2-suit, and the extra-challenging 4-suit. If you’re a beginner I highly recommend that you stick with the default at least at first. BASIC GAMEPLAY
The rules are simple. You are dealt 10 columns of cards on the tableau, upon which you may stack cards numerically in descending order (Ace is low), and any such stack can be moved together. While a card or stack of any suit may be placed on a numerically appropriate card of any other suit, your goal is to make suit-matched stacks that run from King to Ace – when you complete one it will be whisked away to the bottom left of the screen. You also have 5 stock piles at the bottom right of your screen — clicking on these will deal one card face-up to the top of each of your 10 columns. To beat a deal of Spider you have to clear the tableau of cards, which means dealing all 5 stock piles and completing all 8 possible stacks. Spider does keep track of score, for those paying attention to such things, and the system is very simple — each stack you complete scores you 100 points. Each move you make during this process (including undos!) costs you one point. Now let’s discuss some strategies. 1) Don’t be afraid of the stock piles. I know it seems like dealing a stock pile is going to totally screw with all the stacks you have going, but don’t stress about it — you need all those cards. In fact sometimes the next stock pile contains the cards you need most, so when in doubt just deal. And remember, you can always undo a stock pile deal by using the undo button in the bottom right (or pressing [ctrl]+z) so it’s not like you’ve done any permanent damage to your work. WARNING: You can only deal from the stock pile if there is at least one card in each of your ten columns. This is a rule that most people don’t know about, so if you ever find yourself clicking a stock pile and nothing’s happening, you probably have an empty column. Just undo or redistribute some cards until they’re all filled and then deal. And yes, this does mean that if you’re particularly clever/unlucky you can actually get into a position where you don’t have enough cards left on the board to let you deal more – in such situations you’ll have to undo until before your last stack and click a stockpile then. 2) Use the Undo button to experiment and “peek” at facedown cards. I’ve said it in other articles and I’ll say it again – using the undo is not cheating. It’s right there at the bottom right of your screen, or you can hit [ctrl]+z if you’re a keyboard shortcut kind of player. Undo is one of the clearest advantages to playing cards on your computer – it is such an integral part of the game that we even accounted for it in the scoring system in Spider. So yes, in Spider it costs you one point to undo (just like making any other move), but it’s almost always worth it. If you have any doubt about whether or not there is another option to a move you just made, a couple of points is a small price to pay to give each choice a try and discover how the results change. It’s also very useful to help you figure out what the next face-down card in a column might be. Move the card on top of it to an open slot, see what’s there, then decide whether you need that card right now or not – and if not, undo to cover it back up and try a different column. Spider is a game that frequently requires arbitrarily choosing between two or more (often more) identical moves – the undo button is your friend in this wilderness. 3) Manage your columns. No matter how much you might want to do so, it is never feasible in Spider to keep from having multiple partial stacks on top of each other in any of your columns – not even in 1-suit. It’s just how the game goes. Thus, I tend to divide my columns up as the game progresses into two categories – working piles and junk piles. A working pile is a column that I keep clean, containing only a single movable stack whenever possible, and otherwise containing only one or two decently-sized stacks in progress. Whenever I have to deal a stock pile, my working piles are the highest priority to clean off. A junk pile is a column that I will throw anything on that matches numerically, no matter what suit it is, and which are my last priority when it comes to cleaning them off after a deal. In fact, I’ll often use the cards dealt on top of junk piles to start new stack pieces I can use elsewhere. On the left, a working pile. On the right, a junk pile.
Junk piles become more important and will need to be more numerous the more suits you have in your deal, so if you four-suit players are looking for sage advice I can offer none more important than to manage your stacks well and try to maintain at least one or two working piles so you don’t get totally stuck. The ratio I enjoy in 1-suit or 2-suit is generally one junk pile for every three or four working piles. I know it’s not always possible to be so prescriptive, but it’s a good goal to keep in mind. 4) Focus on emptying a column early-on. Many people don’t realize it but you can put any card on an open column, not just a King like in Klondike. This makes open columns essentially the wild cards of Spider, which makes them the single-most valuable resource in the game. Thus it is important to focus as soon as you can on emptying out at least one column so you can have more options. I find them especially useful to help me “peek” at face-down cards from other columns. This means you should generally focus on the columns with the fewest face-down cards underneath them when making choices – if you have a three fours on the board that you can put on your one available 5 on, choose the 4 that is closest to the bottom of its column. Counter intuitive as it may seem, of the three sixes available to put on the seven in the example below it’s actually more important to get the 6 on that Ace out of the way than it is to clear off the nearly complete stack next to the seven.
It bears reminding here that one cannot deal a stock pile with an empty column on the tableau, so don’t forget to put at least one card into any empties you have before you click the stock pile or it won’t work. 5) When in doubt, match suit. I know it seems obvious, but once you graduate from 1-suit don’t forget that it’s really very important to stack cards of the same suit before cards of a different suit. Whenever you have a choice between a move that places a card or stack atop one of the same suit and a move that places that same card or stack atop a card of a different suit, you should generally choose the same suit because it makes that stack bigger and gets you closer to cleaning it off the board. Of course there are going to be situations where you may want to put a stack temporarily on a non-matching card (junk piles, for instance) but that should be the exception not the rule. 6) If you want to master 1- and 2-suit, bang your head against 4-suit for a while. This may sound like my most masochistic piece of advice, but it works – I do it all the time. Think of this technique as Spider resistance training – it’s like doing push-ups with weights on your back, or using a medicine ball at basketball practice. After you do it for a while, using those (in this case mental) muscles under a more normal load will seem much easier. As frustrating and harsh as it can feel to play 4-suit Spider (seriously, I’ve beaten exactly one deal of 4-suit in the past two years. ONE!), you have to think so strategically and work so carefully and be so persistent to earn even a single stack that when you go down to 2-suit afterward you will feel like a rock star and you will get higher scores and faster times than you ever got before. The effect is amplified even more when you go back to 1-suit. DAILY CHALLENGES If you’ve never played a Daily Challenge then let me introduce you to them (if you have, just skip this paragraph). Challenges come in four different difficulties – Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert, and there’s a new one for Spider every day. The goal of each challenge is different – some want you to solve the deck just like a normal game, but some want a specific number of stacks to be built, and others want you to earn a specific score. The best part is that because I play every single one of them myself when I create them I can guarantee you that they are 100% solvable. Anyway, because Challenges often have different goals than a basic game of Spider, they can be tricky, so there are some very specific strategies for how to best go about beating them. The following sections detail tips for how to beat specific challenge types. General Challenge Tips – Once in a while a challenge will have a time limit or a moves limit. The strategy versus a time limit is obvious — just play as quickly and efficiently as you can. Against a moves limit, on the other hand, you’ll actually want to do the opposite — slow down and consider each move you make so you don’t waste any. Some challenges will start off with the deal partially solved — these will feel a little different, and will often require some untangling before you can reach your goal so it can help to think of them as puzzles. Solve Challenges – since the goal is just to solve the deck, you can refer to the hints in the basic gameplay section for these ones. You won’t have to worry about score, so you’ll find it extra productive to use the undo button to peek and help you make decisions. Stack Challenges – these challenges ask you to build a certain number of stacks, so they play like a solve challenge you don’t have to completely solve. Even the Hard and Expert stack challenges that are 2-suit (or once in a while 4-suit) are built through having me actually play it until I have the number of stacks required, so even if one seems like it can’t be beat trust me – it’s solvable. Score Challenges – these challenges do ask you to play a little differently, because most players familiar with basic gameplay tend to ignore the score altogether. If you fall into that category, I’ll refresh your memory: each move you make costs 1 point, each Undo you use costs 1 point, and you gain 100 points for each stack you complete. In general the Easies and Mediums should just be a matter of time for all but the most inexperienced players, but there are some Hard and Expert challenges in which making too many extraneous moves or using the Undo button too many times can add up to a loss. So when you see multiple suits in a Score Challenge, keep in mind that every move and Undo counts. Good Luck!
PLAY MORE 42 SOLITAIRE GAMES |
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