Spider Solitaire Variants: Scorpion to Arachnid

Spider Solitaire is the best-known member of a small family of closely related games. The family shares three core features: two decks shuffled together, tableau play that emphasizes same-suit descending runs, and an endgame defined by removing complete King-to-Ace sequences. Inside those shared features, each variant bends a specific rule — the dealing mechanics, the presence of reserve piles, the alternating-color requirement — and each bend produces a different game.

This guide is a tour of the Spider family's main branches. For each variant we name the rule change, the strategic consequence, and what the variant teaches a player whose home game is standard Spider. The guide is written jointly by the History Desk (for the lineage and naming) and the Strategy Desk (for the tactical implications). Where the two desks disagree about a variant's historical origin, we have flagged the disputed claim instead of smoothing it over.

Scorpion is the closest cousin to Spider. It uses a single deck (52 cards rather than 104), seven tableau columns, and a reserve of three cards. The tableau deals four face-down cards per column at the start, so you begin the game with a dense layout of hidden information — more face-downs per column than Spider's six-card starting piles. That density is the signature of Scorpion.

Scorpion's signature rule is that tableau builds are same-suit only. Unlike Spider, where you can build mixed-suit descending runs as a fallback, Scorpion requires every descending placement to match suits. That constraint raises the difficulty considerably, because it denies you the mixed-suit relief valve that Spider relies on. Players moving from Spider to Scorpion often feel stuck in the first ten moves because the placements they would casually make in Spider are simply illegal in Scorpion.

The three-card reserve partially offsets the same-suit constraint. When you are out of legal tableau moves, the reserve gives you a final batch of three new cards to inject into the tableau. That small safety net is enough to make Scorpion interesting rather than punishing. Scorpion rewards players who can plan strict same-suit sequences, which makes it a great bridge from 2-suit Spider to stricter suit discipline. See our Scorpion Solitaire page for the full rules and strategy primer.

Scorpion is also the variant where you feel Spider's mixed-run safety most clearly, by its absence. In Spider, when you cannot find a same-suit destination, you can drop a descending card on any suit as a placeholder. That placeholder buys time. Scorpion refuses the placeholder. Every descending placement has to be a real same-suit commitment, which means every move in Scorpion is load-bearing in a way that Spider moves are not. Players who practice Scorpion routinely report that their Spider play tightens afterward: the habits they formed to play Scorpion legally become the habits they use to play Spider well.

Arachnid is a tighter Spider variant that pairs the two-deck format with reserve piles and a modified dealing mechanic. Where Spider deals 54 cards to the tableau and holds 50 in the stock, Arachnid splits the distribution differently to change the pressure on the player: reserves give you a place to stash blocking cards, and the tableau layout starts slightly shallower, which changes opening tempo.

The key strategic adjustment in Arachnid is that reserves change the cost of committing cards. In Spider, every card you commit to a column is either going to be moved again or buried. In Arachnid, the reserve gives you a third option — a neutral holding space that does not force the card into a descending sequence. That extra option shifts play toward longer-term planning, because you can defer commitments that Spider forces immediately.

The variant's name is a reminder that the Spider family is full of arachnid-themed variants — Spider, Arachnid, Scorpion, Wasp — which is either a cluster of independent naming choices or a sign that Spider's creators leaned into the theme deliberately. The History Desk's reading is that the thematic clustering happened mostly in the mid-twentieth century, as game publishers produced themed patience collections and borrowed names to emphasize family resemblance.

Cicely bends Spider's signature rule: instead of building same-suit descending runs, you build alternating-color descending runs, the way Klondike and FreeCell do. That single change reshapes the whole game. Descending placements are now usually legal (alternating colors is a less restrictive constraint than suit matching), but the game's strategic flavor shifts toward Klondike tactics grafted onto Spider's two-deck structure.

For Spider players, Cicely is a useful palate-cleanser. It lets you practice Spider's structural skills (two-deck thinking, stock-deal pacing, empty-column management) without the suit-matching constraint. Once you return to Spider proper, the structural skills translate cleanly and the suit-matching discipline feels lighter because you have separated the two sources of difficulty and trained them independently.

Cicely also illustrates how different the two-deck format feels when the core movement rule changes. With alternating colors, the tableau never jams as hard as Spider's does, because almost every descending placement is available. The game becomes a sequencing puzzle where the main challenge is managing the stock and the empty columns, not the suits. That lighter touch makes Cicely a good warm-up for longer Spider sessions.

Wasp strips Spider's stock entirely. Instead of five forced deals injecting 50 new cards, Wasp deals all 104 cards to the tableau at the start and gives the player three reserve columns for staging. The effect is Spider without the stock-timing layer: you are playing a pure tableau puzzle with all the information visible but with almost no slack.

The strategic shift is large. In Spider, stock deals are both a relief (new material arrives) and a pressure (new material buries old work). Wasp removes both. You start with everything you will ever have, and the three reserves are your only buffer. Players who love Spider's tableau puzzle but dislike the stochastic element of the stock often prefer Wasp. Players who rely on stock deals to bail them out of stuck positions find Wasp unforgiving.

Wasp is also a test of whether your Spider wins come from strategy or from good stock-deal luck. A player who wins 40 percent of their Wasp games has genuine tableau skill, because Wasp strips out the stock randomness. A player who wins 40 percent of Spider games but only 15 percent of Wasp games is probably getting more help from favorable stock deals than they realize. Playing Wasp occasionally is a diagnostic for the quality of your own pure tableau play.

Mrs. Mop is Spider played with a single 52-card deck across eight tableau columns. The shorter deck means the endgame requires four King-to-Ace runs rather than eight, and the tableau columns are shallower from the start. The effect is a faster, lighter Spider — the game is similar in flavor but runs in a third the time.

Mrs. Mop is a good introduction to Spider's rhythm for players who find the full two-deck game long. The same skills apply — column clearing, empty-column defense, same-suit run protection — but the games finish in ten or fifteen minutes rather than twenty-five or thirty. That shorter format makes Mrs. Mop useful for quick practice sessions.

The History Desk notes that the name Mrs. Mop is uncertain in origin, appearing in twentieth-century patience collections without clear etymology. Some sources suggest the name refers to the game's “cleaning up” of the tableau, others tie it to a character in British variety entertainment. We have not been able to confirm either claim in primary sources, and flag it here as disputed.

Spiderette is a miniature one-deck Spider variant that uses seven tableau columns and deals the tableau the way Klondike does: descending row counts from seven cards in the first column down to one card in the seventh. The dealing pattern gives Spiderette a distinctive triangular opening shape that neither Spider nor Klondike quite shares.

Strategically, Spiderette plays as a compressed Spider. Same-suit runs still matter, empty columns still dominate, and the endgame still requires assembling King-to-Ace sequences. The game finishes faster and has fewer structural dead ends because the smaller deck and shallower tableau reduce the information-hiding problem. For a Spider player, Spiderette is where you practice the core Spider skills in a less punishing format.

Two-deck solitaire games emerged as a distinct category in the nineteenth century, when European players began shuffling two decks together to create longer, more strategic patience games. The primary motivation was game length: a single deck produces games that end in five to ten minutes, while a double deck produces games of twenty to forty minutes that reward deeper planning. Spider, Forty Thieves, and Napoleon at St Helena all emerged from this tradition.

Within the two-deck tradition, Spider stands out for its signature constraint: only same-suit runs move as groups. That rule appears to be an innovation specific to Spider (and Scorpion) within the patience canon, and it is what gives both games their distinctive strategic feel. Other two-deck games (Forty Thieves, for example) use different movement rules, and the resulting games play entirely differently despite sharing the two-deck lineage.

The exact origins of Spider are disputed. The name appears in early twentieth-century patience collections and may derive from the tableau's eight foundation slots (like an eight-legged spider), though that etymology is uncertain. What is clear is that Spider became a mass-market game only after Microsoft bundled it with Windows 98 in 1998, at which point its player base grew by orders of magnitude.

For Spider mastery, the variants are useful training tools. Each one isolates a specific Spider skill and lets you practice it without the other skills interfering. Scorpion trains strict same-suit discipline. Wasp trains tableau-only planning without stock-timing pressure. Cicely trains structural Spider skills without the suit constraint. Mrs. Mop and Spiderette train core Spider rhythm in a compressed format.

Our recommendation at the Strategy Desk is to use variants as a rotation when your Spider win rate plateaus. If 4-suit Spider is stuck at 15 percent, play twenty hands of Scorpion to sharpen same-suit discipline, then return to Spider. The shift of context often breaks bad habits that pure Spider grinding would not.

Variants also reveal which of your Spider skills are real and which are habits. A skill that transfers (column clearing, empty-column defense) is a real skill. A habit that does not transfer (a specific suit-matching shortcut that Spider allows but Scorpion does not) is something you will need to relearn in different games. Playing the variants is how you separate the two.