Spider Solitaire: How Much Harder Is Each Suit? Our Data Answers

Spider Solitaire: How Much Harder Is Each Suit? Our Data Answers

Data period: February 1 – March 31, 2026 Sample: 2,625 Spider games (1,543 one-suit, 728 two-suit, 354 four-suit)

Spider Solitaire comes in three difficulty settings that share a name but play like different games. One suit, two suits, four suits — the rule change sounds simple. The data shows it’s anything but.

Over two months and 2,625 games on TrySolitaire, here’s how the three variants actually compare.

The Win Rates

Win rate is wins divided by total starts — abandoned games count as non-wins, same methodology we use across all our reports.

Nearly half of all 1-suit games end in a win. Drop to 4-suit and that falls to 1 in 5. That’s not a small difference — it’s a 2.5x gap in win rate between the easiest and hardest variants of the same game.

The jump from 1-suit to 2-suit is the steeper drop: 49.3% down to 35.9%, a 13-point fall. Going from 2-suit to 4-suit costs another 16 points. Both transitions are painful, but neither is a gentle step.

How Winners Play Each Variant

For completed winning games, the profiles look like this:

A few things stand out.

1-suit and 2-suit take the same time to win, but not the same moves. Both average 37 minutes for a winning game. But 2-suit winners need 28% more moves to get there — 159 vs 124. They’re not playing faster or slower, they’re navigating a more complex board that demands more decisions per unit of time.

4-suit is in a different league entirely. 222 moves and 76 minutes for a winning game — double the duration of the other two variants. Winning 4-suit Spider isn’t just harder, it’s a fundamentally longer commitment. A player who sits down for a quick game and picks 4-suit is in for a surprise.

Undo usage scales dramatically with suit count. 1-suit winners use 3.4 undos on average. 2-suit winners use 10.8. 4-suit winners use 18.6 — more than five times the undo usage of 1-suit winners. This isn’t a sign of weaker play; it’s a reflection of what the game demands. With four suits in play, the consequences of a suboptimal move compound quickly. Winners in 4-suit use undo as a thinking tool, not a crutch.

What the Difficulty Curve Actually Looks Like

The common assumption is that Spider difficulty increases linearly: 1-suit is easy, 2-suit is medium, 4-suit is hard. The data suggests it’s less linear than that.

The win rate drop from 1-suit to 2-suit (13 points) and from 2-suit to 4-suit (16 points) are similar in size — but the move count and undo usage tell a different story. 2-suit adds complexity gradually. 4-suit breaks the pattern: double the time, 40% more moves, and nearly double the undos compared to 2-suit. The difficulty doesn’t just increase with 4-suit — it accelerates.

If you’ve mastered 1-suit and want a challenge, 2-suit is a reasonable next step. If you’ve jumped straight to 4-suit and are struggling, that’s not a skill problem — it’s a difficulty problem. The data says even experienced players win only 1 in 5 times.

Which Variant Should You Play?

That depends on what you want from the game.

1-suit is the right choice if you want to win roughly half your games, learn the mechanics, and enjoy satisfying sessions without the frustration of frequent dead ends. At 49.3%, you’re winning almost as often as you’re losing.

2-suit is the competitive middle ground. A 35.9% win rate means you’ll lose more than you win, but not by a discouraging margin. The added complexity of a second suit opens up new strategic depth without the full brutality of 4-suit.

4-suit is for players who are comfortable losing often in exchange for the satisfaction of occasionally solving something genuinely difficult. A 20.1% win rate means 4 losses for every win. The 76-minute average winning game means when you do win, you’ve earned it.

All three variants are available on TrySolitaire. Play Spider →

A Note on the Data

Winner profiles in this post reflect completed winning games only. For Spider, abandoned games do not record undo count in our current tracking — so we can profile how winners play each variant, but can’t directly compare winners to non-winners on undo usage. We’re working on a fix and will revisit undo behavior across all games in a future post. Win rates are calculated correctly using total starts as the denominator, including all abandoned games. For Spider rules and general strategy, see our Spider Solitaire Guide and Spider Difficulty Guide.

All data is anonymous. TrySolitaire does not track individual users. Data covers February 1 – March 31, 2026, across 2,625 Spider games.

Published April 8, 2026 | TrySolitaire Blog · Play Free Solitaire