Solitaire card games are played almost everywhere. Whether it's to train the brain, pass some time, or make some money, solitaire can accommodate all the needs of a player. As of now, countless variations of solitaire exist, and each has its own custom rules. However, the version that stands tall as an all-time favorite is definitely the spider solitaire.
Superstitious History of Game
Evidence suggests that solitaire was invented either in Scandinavia or Germany. However, back then, the cards were used mainly by card readers as part of their fortune-telling practices. They believed that the loss of multiple games in a row was a warning about an unfortunate future, whereas a victory in the very first round was considered as a sign of great things to come. Later, as solitaire became more well-known, people started playing it in other contexts and for other purposes. Pretty soon numerous solitaire rule books were published by various authors, which further reinforced the spread of this game.
How Spider Solitaire Is Played?
To play spider solitaire, two standard 52-card decks will be required. First, the decks will have to be shuffled together, and then a tableau in the form of a row of ten face-down cards will need to be laid out. All in all, the first four rows will have 6 cards with the last one face-up and the rest 6 rows will contain 5 cards, also with the last one being faced up. Once this setup is complete, the rest of the deck will be kept aside to be used as the stockpile. The goal of spider solitaire is to remove all the cards from the tableau by creating sequences or runs of cards in descending order, i.e. from the high king to the low ace in their own suits. Each time a sequence is completed, that run of cards will be removed from the game. A total of eight such sequences need to be formed to win the game. As a rule, spider solitaire allows a lot of freedom so users can achieve the game's objective. During the gameplay, players can move cards from one column to another as long as the card being moved is a rank lower than the card it is being moved on to, e.g. an 8 can be moved onto a 9. What this means is that sequences can be made in the columns regardless of their suit. Although this is very helpful when trying to get certain cards out of the way, this will not qualify as a run that can be removed from the table. If the shifting of cards helps bring a face-down card to the surface of the column, then that card can be flipped over and introduced to the game so that the player can use it to make more moves. And if the player is stuck because there are no possible moves left, then s/he can use the stockpile to introduce a new row of ten face-up cards in hopes of being able to resume the game. To add more, the runs of cards can be moved together from one column to another, but this only applies if the run has been made with cards from a single suit. In spider solitaire, when a column becomes empty it does not have to be filled in with a king. ANY card or sequence of cards can take up that space. Furthermore, if new cards are to be introduced to gameplay from the stockpile, then there cannot be any empty columns. This means a player might even have to break up a sequence s/he created simply to meet this criterion. When a player manages to get all the cards on the tableau into a sequence, s/he wins the game. If the player happens to get stuck with no more possible moves, then s/he loses. As far as scoring goes, a player starts with 500 points. For each move the player makes s/he loses one point, but for each completed sequence s/he removes s/he gains 100 points. Luckily, the rules of spider solitaire can be customized to change the difficulty of this game. For example, instead of only being able to remove sequences made out of a single suit, players can decide to remove runs made of a single color or even runs that were made by mixing both suits and colors.
Mind-Blowing Facts about Solitaire Card Game
There are some pretty interesting things about solitaire that will boggle your entire brain. For starters, did you know that to play EVERY possible combination of solitaire, each and every person in the world today would have to play 100 matches of solitaire every day for 10,000 years straight! Aside from card readers, the classic game of solitaire was first played by French prisoners, who were held captive in the Royal Prisons of France. This, added to the fact that solitaire uses a lot of French words such as 'tableau', led to people mistakenly believing that the card game was created by some French prisoner. Napoleon Bonaparte, who was a well-known French military leader and emperor during the French Revolution, also used to play solitaire to sharpen his mental abilities. It is said that even when Napoleon was exiled to the island of St. Helena, he used to play solitaire to combat loneliness. And to commemorate this, many solitaire variations have been named after Napoleon. People even go as far as dubbing him the inventor of solitaire! Since time immemorial, a digital version of solitaire has been included in every version of the Windows operating system. And the reason behind it was to introduce people to dragging and dropping. Yes, that simple modern-day action that we do every minute of our waking hours was still a very new thing back in the 1980s, and people just didn't get it. To help users overcome fear and soothe them into using the new system, Microsoft included solitaire, which made it the most enjoyable card game of all times!