Πασιέντζα Αράχνη: πώς παίζεται: Κανόνες

Spider Solitaire is a patience game for one player with two packs of cards, 104 in all. Ten columns of cards sit on the table, most of them face down, and you sort them into runs from King down to Ace in a single suit. Each finished run leaves the table. You choose how many suits the 104 cards use: one suit is gentle, two suits is a fair challenge and four suits, the traditional game, is one of the hardest patiences there is.

Shuffle the 104 cards and deal 54 of them into ten columns, one row at a time from left to right: the first four columns get 6 cards and the other six get 5. Only the last card of each column is face up. The other 50 cards form the stock, face down, enough for five deals of ten cards. With one suit all 104 cards are spades; with two suits there are 52 spades and 52 hearts; with four suits there are two full packs.

1. 01Build down in the columns by one rank, in any suit: a card may go on the last card of another column if it is one rank lower, such as any 7 on any 8. Nothing goes on an Ace.
2. 02Cards in order and of one suit at the end of a column form a run, and a run moves together, all of it or any lower part of it. Cards in order but of mixed suits must be moved apart, one run of one suit at a time.
3. 03Any card or run of one suit, not only a King, may be moved into an empty column.
4. 04When the last face-down card of a column is uncovered, it turns face up.
5. 05Deal from the stock whenever you like: one card goes face up on each of the ten columns. You may only deal when every column holds at least one card. As an exception made here, you may deal with empty columns when fewer than ten cards are left on the table, since they could never all be filled.
6. 06As soon as a column ends with a full run from King down to Ace in one suit, the run leaves the table by itself and the card under it turns face up. In the printed rules taking a run off is optional; here it always happens.
7. 07Deals are not numbered here. Every game comes from a shuffled deck that is recorded, so it can be replayed.

You win when all eight runs have left the table. When the stock is empty and no sequence of moves can ever turn up another card or finish another run, the game is over without a win; it tells you so instead of leaving you to shuffle cards back and forth. Every game also stops after 3,000 moves. There is no points score: the game counts the cards left, the runs finished and the deals left in the stock.

The earliest printed description known to patience researchers is an unsigned magazine article of November 1937. Albert Ostrow described the game in The Complete Card Player (1945) with a slightly different start: 50 cards in five rows, four face down and one face up, and a short last deal of four cards. By 1949 Albert Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith were describing the layout used today, 54 cards in ten columns followed by five deals of ten. Playing with one or two suits, all 104 cards repeating them, is a later way of making the game easier.