"solitaire extraordinaire. For 2 or more persons"a humorous reference to the way it is always played in a club setting. As you can see, Spider is a game played by hackers, among others, so it is naturally one of the most intriguing and challenging games of solitaire. Now it is available to the general public. Well, at least to those of you who have a Mac. In all fairness, there also have been several versions written for MS Windows. Probably the best among these is John A Junod's WinSpider. No one has ever bribed me enough to port my own Mac version to Windows.
My program has all the bells, whistles and gongs you could hope for, and the cards are quite large and ornately designed, as you can see from this sample:
The size of the cards made it quite a challenge to fit on a standard 640x480 monitor, because Spider is played with two decks, and the piles of cards can get extremely long. These cards are especially designed for use with Spider's long piles. They deliberately have no border, and have the suit marking next to, rather than below the number marking.
The best way to learn this game is to download it from the Mac software archive at the University of Michigan. You can play it for free until you get pretty good at it. It is shareware, and will ask you to pay to register it ($20 in the US) before it will finish. If your Mac doesn't have a floppy disk, let me know and I will deliver your copy to you electronically. If you don't have a Mac, then you have my sincere condolences.
Send me email about Spider. I love to talk about it. Mail to srw@alum.mit.edu.
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Last updated February 9, 2001.