Big Spider is Spider scaled up until the board fills the screen. Three full packs — 156 cards — are spread across thirteen columns, and instead of eight completed runs you need twelve. Every rule is Spider's: drop a card on any card one rank above it, lift only a same-suit sequence, and a King-to-Ace run of one suit leaves the board. What changes is the arithmetic. There are more columns to work with, more cards to sort, and three of every card in the pack instead of two. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: collect all twelve suit runs, King down to Ace.
Scaling Spider up does not simply make it longer. Three of every card changes which moves are safe, and thirteen columns changes what a space is worth.
Big Spider is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Spider variant played with three packs across thirteen rows, with Spiderwort recorded as an alternative name. Its class does two things and nothing else: widen the board to thirteen columns, and deal five hidden rows plus one turned row rather than Spider's slightly uneven arrangement. Every rule about building, lifting, collecting and dealing is inherited unchanged from Spider itself.
Three-pack solitaires are uncommon, and the reason is usually that they take a long time without becoming more interesting. Big Spider avoids that because the extra pack changes something real: with three copies of every card, the probability that a needed card exists somewhere reachable goes up sharply, so the game is less about protecting scarce cards and more about managing a very large working area. Whether that is an improvement is a matter of taste, but it is genuinely a different problem.
It is also the widest board in this catalogue — thirteen columns beside a scoreboard of twelve — and it was the game that made the shared Spider engine stop treating pack count as a choice between one and two.
Its siblings change a rule instead of a size. Tarantula lets same-colour runs travel; Black Widow lets any run travel; Grounds for a Divorce bends the ranks into a cycle. For the two-deck original, play Spider; for a quick one-deck game, Spiderette.
One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Big Spider mostly skill, and no published win rate for it that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Expect a long game: twelve sets and 156 cards take considerably more moves than Spider, even when the extra duplicates make individual decisions more forgiving.
Three, which is 156 cards. That means three copies of every single card in the pack, and twelve completed suit runs to assemble instead of Spider's eight.
It is not. Every rule about building, lifting, collecting and dealing is Spider's, unchanged. What differs is thirteen columns instead of ten, three packs instead of two, and twelve sets instead of eight.
It makes individual decisions more forgiving, because the card you need is more likely to exist somewhere reachable. It does not make the game shorter — there is simply much more to sort.
The PySol Fan Club collection records Spiderwort as an alternative name for this game. This catalogue lists it as Big Spider, the name it is registered under, but the rules are identical either way.
It deals one card onto every column at once — thirteen cards per deal, six deals in total — and there is no redeal. It also refuses to deal while any column is empty, so gaps must be filled first.
Any card, or any same-suit descending run. With thirteen columns you get more chances to clear one than in Spider, and an empty column is still the most valuable thing on the board.