Spider Solitaire

• Build in suit wherever you have a choice. A black nine on a red ten is a legal move, but that pair can never be lifted as one piece afterwards. Every mixed join is a knot you will have to untie later. It is the rule that gives Spider its difficulty, and it is why the game feels nothing like FreeCell, where every card is face up from the start.
• Empty a column as early as you can, and then treat it as a workspace rather than somewhere to park a King. An empty column is what lets you take a mixed pile apart one card at a time and put it back in the right order.
• Do not deal until you have genuinely run out of moves. The game will stop you dealing on to an empty column, but it will happily let you bury a good position under ten new cards. Look for one more move first: every deal makes the board harder.
• When two moves look equally good, make the one that turns a face-down card face up. Face-down cards are the only information you are missing, and the column with the most of them is the one to attack.
• The fastest route to an empty column is usually the short one with only one or two hidden cards left in it, not the tidy one you have been building. Finish the short column first.
• Restart deals you the same hand again from the beginning; New Game deals a fresh one. When a hand beats you, Restart is by far the more useful of the two — you already know where the cards are, and a hand that looked hopeless often opens up when you make the first ten moves in a different order.
• Do not treat One Suit as a beginner's setting to be got past. With a single suit every card joins to every other of the right rank, so the whole game becomes column space and burial — the same skills the harder settings ask for, with less to hold in your head.

Nothing here moves unless you move it, and nothing runs out. There is a clock, but it only counts upwards: it sits in a small panel labelled Time at the bottom of the board, beside Score and Moves, and nothing whatever happens when the number gets large. If a counting clock is a distraction, open the cog button and, under Windows, switch Time off — Score and Moves can go the same way. Those choices are remembered on this device.

Cards can be dragged, but they never have to be. Tap a card to lift it, along with everything in order beneath it, then tap the column you want it in; tapping an empty column works the same way. If your hand is unsteady this is much easier to control than a drag, and there is no penalty for tapping the wrong place — the card is simply put back down. Tapping the lifted card again puts it down too.

Undo is unlimited and reaches right back to the deal, either by the Undo button or by holding Control and pressing Z. On a Mac it has to be the Control key: Command and Z does nothing in this game. Two settings under the cog are worth knowing about. Animate, which is on, slides the cards as they move; turn it off and every move happens instantly, which is easier to follow if moving objects are hard to track. Sound is the small flick of a card landing. A game in progress is not saved, so reloading deals you a new hand, but your suit setting, your sound and animation choices and the positions of the small panels are all kept.

Patience games — solitaire, in American usage — are younger than most people assume. The first known printed reference is German and dates from 1783, and the games seem to have spread through northern Europe as a fashionable amusement before they reached England at all. The first collection published in English was Lady Adelaide Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Patience, which appeared in the 1870s and set out the rules of games still played today — among them Klondike, the one most people now simply call Solitaire. Almost everything in the family descends from that piece of Victorian tidying-up.

Spider is later. It is usually dated to 1949, and its name comes from the count of its foundations: eight completed runs to finish a game, eight legs on a spider. For half a century it stayed a specialist's game, because two packs, ten columns and a long careful hand are a lot to lay out on a table. Then in 1998 Microsoft put it in an add-on pack for Windows 98, and afterwards into Windows itself, which is where nearly everybody who plays it first met it. The one-suit setting most people start with is a modern kindness: the game as it was written uses all four.

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