You are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience.

Spider Solitaire Challenge Lets You Learn About Inspiring Humans While Playing Cards

June 8, 2021

Choice is a wonderful thing. That’s why we love Solitaired, the peerlessly comprehensive Solitaire game collection.

But choice can sometimes be overwhelming, which is why we’re also delighted to reveal that the team behind Solitaired has just released Spider Solitaire Challenge, a standalone version of Spider Solitaire.

It’s distinctly possible that you don’t know much about Spider Solitaire, as Klondike, FreeCell, and Pyramid tend to hog the limelight in the world of Solitaire variants. Here’s how it works.

Each round of Spider Solitaire involves sorting two decks of cards – 104 in total. 54 of these cards are dealt at the outset, in four columns of six and six columns of five, with the top card of each column face-up.

The aim is to clear the cards away neatly. After all, every version of Solitaire is basically a fun way of tidying up. To clear cards from the board you need to get a full suit, from ace to king.

Spider Solitaire is simple enough if you’re only using one suit. The difficulty comes when you add a second suit, or all four. That’s because you can’t move a stack of numerically ordered cards if they have more than one suit in them – only if they all belong to the same suit.

This adds a serious layer of complexity to Spider Solitaire, making it both the easiest form of Solitaire and the trickiest, depending on how many suits you play with.

Like Solitaired before it, Spider Solitaire Challenge has another missions besides being lots of fun. In partnership with institutions such as MIT and Encyclopedia Britannica, its developers have created a number of custom decks celebrating notable people.

There’s a deck celebrating the Heroes of Space & Flight, a deck commemorating the leading figures of the women’s suffrage movement, a deck of Notable Women in Computing, and many more.

To check them out, play Spider Solitaire Challenge for free online, or on the Google Play Store. An iOS version is in the works and will be out soon.