Strategy from Solitaire: 5) Spider
Spider is the most complicated solitaire game. And in many ways, the most realistic. Exploration has a cost. The changes of climate can be devasting. While 99.99% of Freecell games are winnable, the most complicated forms of Spider, played with four suits, maybe 99% unwinnable. This teaches an important strategic lesson: Don’t play four-suit Spider. There are many games in life we cannot win. The most famous was in the movie War Games. Most of what we call “vice” represents games no one can win in the long run.
However, we can learn other valuable lesson from the winnable forms of Spider, the no-suit and two-color versions. In either form, this game takes patience. A Spider game is more than twice as time consuming as other forms of solitaire, and where points matter, each move has a cost. It takes so long because it is played, not with one, but with two decks of cards. The no-suit or one suit version treats all the suits a belonging to the same hierarchy. The two-color version has black hierarchies and red hierarchies. Look at the illustration above, This is a “no-suit” or “one-suit” game so all the cards are spades.
The most important strategic lesson of Spider is that we must take the time to examine all our options. If we get to the end of this game without winning, it takes a lot more time to start over than with most games. We never have so many options in our choices in this game that we cannot examine them all. While speed is the essence of war, careful exploration is the key to many strategic situations. This game represents situations where the is a lot of ground that must be explored and where progress is very dependent on the changes of Climate. A single missed opportunity can be very costly.
Mission, Ground, and Climate
The general goal of this game is to complete hierarchies, from the king to the ace. In the two-color game, the hierarchy must be either all red or all black. In the no-suite game, only card values matter. The three possible missions are 1) to clear the board, 2) score a certain number of points, or 3) clear a certain number of stacks. A “stack” is one hierarchy. Like Pyramid, the goal is removing cards. When we complete a stack, in it is removed from the board.
The game above’s mission is shown at the top of the screen. In this game, the goal is to get 700 points. It started with 400 points. One very realistic aspect of this game is that each move costs points. Exploration is required, but it is also costly. Finishing a stack removes it from the game and gains us100 points. When playing games for points, we have to be aware of where we are in terms of how many stacks we must clear to get to the point goal. Every time we use 100 points in making or undoing moves, we must clear another stack to get it back, and that is not always very easy.
The Ground that is the board, the Tableau, consists of 54 cards, in ten columns. Six columns have five cards each. Four columns have six cards each. The bottom cards of each column are initially turned over. The other forty-four cards as face-down, unknown resources. This is the largest amount of unexplored territory in any game. We can think of each column here as a different position in the different aspects of our life. Resources found in one part of our lives can be applied to other parts.
The Climate is the deck in the lower right of the screen. Initially, it consists of fifty cards. Cards are added ten at a time to the game, one on each stack. We can see how many more ten-card turns we have left by looking at the deck. In the illustration, we can see that the main stack made of five smaller sections, each with ten cards. These cards represent fifty unknown resources, but, like every other game of solitaire, there are still more resources on the ground than in the changes of climate,
The cards from Climate can help us and hurt us. They give us more resources, but those resource can also block already known resources. This affects our method of play, The changes in climate are about ten times more impactful in Spider than any other game of solitaire. It is also more realistic because they can hurt us, not only by not giving us what we need, but by taking away resources we had before a round of Climate change. This is important to remember in real life, where change hurts as much as it helps.
Methods
The method is moving unblocked resources from the Ground to create hierarchies. The main decision we must make is which card to move and in which order. This is the decision of deciding our priorities in life as far as making moves. This is the key to winning the game. Look at the illustration above. There are two jacks we can move. Which do we chose. Normally, we want to clear out a column, so we choose the shortest column, the jack with only one card below it. When a column is cleared, we can play any card into it. This is especially important as columns are blocked by Climate, allowing us to unblock them. However, we do not move anything without exploring first. How? Read on.
See the four tens in the illustration. We can play two of them onto jacks, but which two? We discover this by exploring, moving one ten, to see what is under it, and then undoing the move by pressing the “undo” button, lower right. Under the right-most ten, there is a five, allows us to move the stake beginning with four making a five-cards stack. A general rule is that we build up the biggest the stack. This is a strategy for ur real lives as well. Usually, we build on our best developed positions
The next ten to the left hides an eaght. This is an okay card, allowing us to move one of our two sevens. The next ten to the left, however, hide a ten. A bad card because we already have four to play. We won’t move that one. The next ten hides a two, which we don’t need now. We play the tens hiding the five and the seven, but we can to remember where the two and ten are, if we can. This is a little like the game of concentration. The exploration so far has sof us eight points, one for each move and then another for undoing the move. We can also research further, seeing what is under the four when moved to the uncovered four, and find out which of the two sevens to move to the eight. I usually do explore further, but this is a judgment call. Deeper exploration is more costly and therefore riskier,
How does exploration relate to our real lives? Before making moves, we can research our options by talking to people. We may even discover more opportunities beyond the current move. By getting their reaction to a possible move, we prioritize our moves by picking the ons that get the most positive reactions and uncover the most new opportunities or resources.
However, Spider has one option that we do not have in real life. As I said, a change of climate can be either good or bad. In Spider, we can roll back time to erase bad changed. Often, we can undo some of the problems by adjusting our past position. After the “flop,” we can see which cards in it are playable and which are unplayable blocking their columns. For example, if our longest and more valuable stack is blocked by difficult cards like a king, which can only be playing into an empty column, we can often preserve most of that stack by moving it to another column that will have a playable card. The king then falls on a less important column and our best hierarchy is preserved.
This “time machine” is the less realistic part of the game, but Spider is a hard game, one that would too often be unwinnable without this feature. I have played two-color games that have taken over an hour even with this feature.
Conclusions
This is the only solitaire game that I cannot think of a way to adapt to the more general lessons of strategy, It offers many lessons, but they are far from simple. Last week, I forgot to mention that I would adapt Tripeaks by replacing the card deck hierarchy with a real-life one, with visionaries at the top, leaders next, advisers next, and so on.
This ends our series on solitaire. Next week we will resume posts for our paid subscribers on other fun strategic topics.