Spider Solitaire 4 Suits — Expert Mode, Play Free
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Expert mode
Spider Solitaire with four suits
The deck
Two complete standard decks — spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs. The same 10-column, 54-card deal, now with a three-in-four chance any placement is off-suit.
The demand
Legal moves are everywhere; correct moves are rare. Winning requires reading five moves ahead and refusing shortcuts the game constantly offers.
The reward
Roughly one game in sixteen ends in victory without undo. Players who reach even 10% have built genuine expertise — measurable, repeatable, earned.
The expert's guide
The hardest table in solitaire
Four-suit Spider has a reputation that precedes it, and the reputation is deserved. This is the mode veterans mean when they call Spider one of the hardest card games ever put on a screen — the full two-deck game with all four suits live, where the forgiving physics of 1 suit and the balanced tension of 2 suits give way to something closer to a planning problem with a shuffle in it.
That number is the honest headline. Nothing about the rules changes at 4 suits — same 104-card deal, same five stock rows, same King-to-Ace goal. What changes is the price of everything.
What actually changes
With four suits in play, only a quarter of the cards match any given run. The practical consequences compound on each other:
- Most placements are off-suit by default. You are no longer choosing between clean and convenient moves; you are rationing a scarce supply of clean ones.
- Mixed stacks fossilize. At 2 suits an awkward pile can often be unwound in a few moves. At 4 suits, unwinding a three-color stack may require exactly the ranks you buried beneath it.
- Margins vanish. A single careless placement in the first deal can foreclose a game you will not officially lose for another twenty minutes. The feedback is delayed, which is precisely why undisciplined play persists.
Skills from 2 suits transfer — reveal priority, stock timing — but the tolerance for improvisation does not. If you have not read the strategy guide recently, read it again after a few 4-suit games; sections that seemed obvious become urgent.
Planning five moves deep
At lower difficulties you can play greedily — take the best-looking move, repeat. At 4 suits the winning mental habit is sequence thinking: before touching a card, trace the full line. If I move the club 6 to the heart 7, the spade 4 is exposed; that frees the diamond 5's slot; that lets the spade run reach the 4; and the column is empty in two more moves. Five moves, one intention.
The discipline this enforces is thinking in destinations rather than moves. Ask not "what can I do?" but "what position am I trying to reach before the next stock deal?" — usually a specific reveal, a specific pure run extended, or a column emptied. Then find the move order that gets there. Order matters enormously: the same set of moves executed in the wrong sequence routinely strands a card that the right sequence frees for nothing.
Empty-column supremacy
Every Spider guide praises empty columns. At 4 suits they are not merely valuable — they are the axis the whole game turns on. An open column is the only general-purpose tool for unwinding mixed stacks: park a card, move the freed sequence, re-park, re-lift. With two open columns you can relocate almost any short mixed pile; with none you can only make moves the table happens to offer.
Expert play treats the first empty column as the primary objective of the opening, ahead of run-building. And spending one is a calculated act: filled carelessly before a stock deal, a column may take fifteen moves to re-open. The standing rule — never deal from the stock while a productive move exists — is enforced without mercy here, because each deal buries ten more cards under whatever disorder you tolerated.
Breaking suits on purpose
Paradoxically, the mode that punishes off-suit play hardest also demands it most precisely. Perfect suit purity is impossible at 4 suits — the cards simply do not cooperate — so expertise lies in choosing which debts to take on. A deliberate suit break is justified when it buys a reveal, keeps a column recoverable, or dismantles a bigger obstruction; the skill is placing the break where you can service it, on a rank you have spare copies of, in a column you plan to dig anyway. Casual breaks lose games; surgical breaks win them. The distinction between the two, more than any other single judgment, is the 4-suit skill, and it evolves directly from the discipline learned at 2 suits — our 2-vs-4-suit strategy comparison traces exactly how the priorities shift.
Playing lost positions for information
Most 4-suit games are lost. What separates an expert's loss from a novice's is what gets extracted from it. When a position turns hopeless — no productive moves, stock exhausted or unhelpful — resist the instant restart. Play it out: force the remaining reveals, test whether an unlikely unwind exists, find the move you would have needed three deals earlier. Losses examined this way become the curriculum. Losses skipped are just time spent.
Related, and worth naming plainly: undo-as-analysis. Used analytically — deal, study what landed, rewind, choose the branch the information favors — undo turns a game of guesses into a game of lines, the way an engine turns chess study into search. Each undo costs a point under classic scoring (500 start, −1 per move, +100 per completed run), which prices analysis honestly. Whether you play with it or without it, be consistent, so your numbers mean something.
How experts measure progress
At a 6% base rate, single games tell you nothing — a strong player loses twenty straight without playing badly, and a weak one stumbles into a win. Meaningful measurement needs volume: rolling win percentage over your last 100 games is the standard yardstick. Moving from 5% to 8% across two such blocks is a real, non-random improvement. Between wins, secondary indicators track skill more sensitively: average face-down cards revealed per game, how often you empty a column before the second stock deal, average score per loss. All of them rise as your play tightens, long before the win column shows it.
A difficulty famous for a reason
Since Spider shipped with Windows 98's Plus! pack and then XP, 4 suits has been the difficulty setting most players tried once and quietly backed away from — the origin of a thousand forum threads asking whether winning is even possible. It is possible; it is just rare enough that each win is memorable, which is the entire appeal. Among mainstream solitaires only FreeCell approaches Spider's depth, and FreeCell shows you every card — near-perfect information, ~99% of deals winnable. Four-suit Spider grants no such courtesy: 44 cards face down and a solution corridor a few moves wide. If the edge cases ever bite — empty-column deal refusals, completed-run timing — the complete rules page covers every one.
Expert questions, answered
Can every 4 suit Spider game be won?
No. Solver studies of 4-suit deals consistently find that a meaningful minority are unwinnable from the opening position — no line of play saves them. That is on top of the far larger share that are technically winnable but require near-perfect play. A loss at this level is data, not a verdict; the analysis is laid out in our winnability article.
What counts as a good win rate at 4 suits?
Without undo, the population average sits around 6%. Winning one game in ten undo-free puts you well above it; strong dedicated players reach 15–20%, and with heavy analytical undo use skilled players can pass 50%. Whatever your style, fix it and measure over at least 100 games — at these percentages, small samples are pure noise.
How long does a 4 suit game take?
A serious attempt commonly runs 30 minutes or more, and analytical players using undo to explore branches can spend well past an hour on a single deal. Budget accordingly: this is not a coffee-break mode. If you want Spider in ten-minute portions, 2 suits is the right table.
Is 4 suit Spider the hardest solitaire?
Among widely played solitaires, it has the strongest claim. FreeCell is nearly always winnable and Klondike hovers far above 6%. Four-suit Spider combines massive hidden information (44 face-down cards) with brutal move constraints, so both luck and deep skill are stretched to their limits. Some obscure variants are statistically crueler, but none is as demanding per decision at this level of popularity.
Is using undo at 4 suits cheating?
It is a style choice, and at this level a defensible one. Undo-as-analysis — deal, observe, rewind, choose the better branch — is how many experts explore a position, the way a chess player analyzes lines before moving. Undo-free play is the purer test of judgment under uncertainty. Both are legitimate; just never compare an undo-assisted win rate to an undo-free one.
I have lost twenty in a row. Is that normal?
Entirely. At a 6% base rate, twenty straight losses is unremarkable — the probability math makes long droughts a certainty, not a sign of decline. This is why experts track rolling win percentage over 100 games and secondary measures like average cards revealed, rather than reacting to streaks. If the drought bothers you, drop to 2 suits for an evening; confidence is a resource too.
Should I ever refuse to complete a finished run?
Occasionally, yes — and it is one of the game’s most advanced ideas. A completed run leaves the table immediately, and sometimes those thirteen cards are load-bearing: the King at the bottom may be holding a slot you need for one more move. Delaying the final card of a run to keep the structure in place, then completing it at the right moment, is a real technique at this level.
What is the longest a 4 suit game can go?
There is no move limit — a grinding, undo-heavy analytical game can run to an hour or more, and hundreds of moves. Undo-free games end faster, one way or the other: most losses are effectively decided within the first two stock deals, even if it takes another ten minutes to confirm. Note that every move, including each undo, still costs a point under classic scoring.