Spider Solitaire with 2 suits: the step up that surprises everyone
Two-suit Spider uses spades and hearts instead of spades alone. It sounds like a small change. For a casual player, it isn't. The same computer player that won just over half its one-suit games won only 5.7% of two-suit games — roughly one game in eighteen.
Why such a cliff? And what can a real player, with the Undo button and a bit of planning, do about it? This page walks through what our tests found and how to use it at the table.
Two suits, measured
| Measurement | 2 suits | 1 suit, for comparison | Games |
|---|---|---|---|
| Win rate with no Undo, visible cards only | 5.7% (95% range 5.0–6.5%) | 52.8% | 4,000 each |
| Suits completed per game, out of 8 | about 0.8 | 4.96 | 4,000 each |
| Games reaching 4 or more completed suits | 6.3% | 56.9% | 4,000 each |
| Moves in a winning game | about 155 | about 118 | 228 and 2,111 wins |
| Column emptied before the first stock deal | 0.5% of games | 1.3% | 4,000 each |
| Wins in those games | 15 of 21 | 51 of 52 | 21 and 52 |
The row that tells the story is "suits completed." With one suit, the bot cleared about five of the eight runs per game. With two, it cleared fewer than one. It isn't just losing at the end; it's getting stuck from early on.
Why the second suit hurts so much
In Spider you can drop any card onto a card one rank higher — a heart 6 on a spade 7 is legal. But only a run of one suit can be moved as a group. With a single suit, every run you build is movable. With two, every time you put a heart on a spade, you've built a run that's stuck together: you can take the top part away only down to where the suit changes.
A casual player (and our bot) makes lots of these mixed-suit moves because they're available. Each one quietly locks cards in place. By the time the stock runs out, the table is full of runs that can't move.
Two-suit rules as played on this site
- 104 cards: two decks' worth of spades and hearts.
- Ten columns of six (the first four) or five cards, only the bottom card face up.
- A 50-card stock dealt one card to each column per click — five deals, no second pass.
- Any card on one rank higher, regardless of suit.
- Only same-suit runs move as a unit.
- Empty columns accept any card or same-suit run.
- A completed King-to-Ace run in one suit leaves the table automatically. Clear all eight to win.
You'll get a warning if you try to deal with an empty column on the table.
How to do better than the bot
Prefer same-suit moves, even if they're slower
If you can put a spade 5 on a spade 6 or a heart 6, choose the spade. Every same-suit link keeps the run portable. The bot's scoring valued a same-suit link ten times more than a mixed one, and still struggled — so be even pickier than it was.
Use mixed moves to dig, not to build
A mixed-suit move is fine when it turns over a face-down card or empties a column. It's a bad trade when it only tidies things up.
An empty column is gold
Our bot only managed to empty a column before the first stock deal in 21 of 4,000 games — but won 15 of them. That's a small sample, but the lesson is the same as in one-suit Spider: clear a column early and the game opens up.
Use the empty column to sort runs
With an empty column you can take a mixed run apart, card by card, and rebuild it by suit. That's the single most useful maneuver in two-suit Spider.
Undo is your biggest advantage
The bot can't take moves back, which is a huge handicap in a game where one mixed-suit move can lock a column. Try, look, and undo freely.
Classic two-suit mistakes
- Stacking hearts on spades (or the reverse) because it's the only move you see.
- Dealing from the stock while a same-suit move is still available.
- Putting a single high card into an empty column and losing the space.
- Expecting to win most games right away. Our bot won one in eighteen; your first dozen games are practice.
Play two-suit Spider here
Free, browser-based, and works on desktop, tablet and phone. No download, no sign-up, no email address needed. The cards are large and clear, with a zoom control for a crowded board. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are all there, along with drag-and-drop or tap-to-move. The game shows wins, time and moves for the current game. Sound can be muted, and you can switch to fullscreen or pick a different table color. There's no gambling and nothing to buy.
New to Spider? Start with one suit. Ready for the hardest version? Try four suits. Want a break with a different kind of puzzle? Golf Solitaire is quick and light.
The research behind these numbers, step by step
Two-suit Spider was tested in September 2026 by the play-solitaire-free-online.us team at Solitairen OOD, using the site's own rules.
- Rules from the game code. Ten columns of 6,6,6,6,5,5,5,5,5,5; a 50-card stock dealt one per column, no redeal; any card on one rank higher; only same-suit runs move; any card into an empty column; complete suits removed automatically. Assumed: you can't deal while a column is empty. The code warns about it, but we didn't confirm in a browser that the deal is blocked.
- Game rebuilt in code. We programmed Spider with two suits, spades and hearts, four copies of each 13-card suit.
- Numbered deals. Seeds 100001 to 104000. The bot's settings were tuned on seeds 1 to 30, so none of the reported games influenced the bot.
- The player. A bot that sees only face-up cards, searches up to 250 positions ahead each turn and never undoes. Its result is a floor, and at two suits it's a low floor: this bot is weak, not a measure of how winnable the game is.
- Running it. 4,000 full games.
- Published comparison. We know of no published figure for two-suit Spider. Blake & Gent (2026) found four-suit Spider 98.5% winnable when every card is known — which tells you that the deals themselves are rarely the problem in Spider. The difficulty is in the playing.
- Margin of error. The bot's true two-suit win rate is almost certainly between 5.0% and 6.5%.
- Limits. We didn't build a perfect-knowledge Spider solver, so we can't say what share of two-suit deals can be won. The early-empty-column result rests on just 21 games.
The code behind the test
This is the same spider.py module as the one-suit test, in Python 3.11 with the standard library only, switched to two suits. The bot's look-ahead is a best-first search of up to 250 positions per turn over visible cards; unseen cards are treated as unknown. It rates positions with a simple score: +30 for each same-suit link, +3 for each mixed link, −25 for each hidden card, +40 for each empty column, +25 for a card just turned over. runner.py used 19 worker processes on a 20-core machine, and the 4,000 games took about 14 minutes. We report Wilson score intervals for the percentages.
Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, helped us write and check the code and draft this page. It did not generate the statistics — they came from the simulation runs, and we reviewed them before publishing.
By Admin, play-solitaire-free-online.us (Solitairen OOD). Research dated September 18, 2026.
Questions new players ask
Why do I win one-suit Spider but lose two-suit?
Because mixed-suit runs can't move as a group. Our bot's win rate fell from 52.8% to 5.7% on that one change.
Can most two-suit games be won?
We don't have a solver figure for two suits. For four suits, published research found 98.5% of deals winnable with every card known, so good play matters far more than the deal.
Is it OK to put a heart on a spade?
It's legal, and sometimes necessary. Just know you've made a run you can't move in one piece, and plan to sort it out later.
What's the bot's average move count in a two-suit win?
Our bot's 228 wins averaged about 155 moves, counting stock deals.
Should I move on to four suits?
Only once two suits feels comfortable. Four-suit Spider is much harder again.