Tarantula is Spider with one rule relaxed: a sequence travels as a unit when every card in it is the same colour, rather than the same suit. Everything else is unchanged — ten columns, two decks, drop any card on the rank above it, and a completed King-to-Ace run of a single suit leaves the board. That last part is what keeps the game honest. You can shuffle red runs around freely, but a red run is half hearts and half diamonds, and only one of those can ever be collected. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: collect all eight suit runs, King down to Ace.
The colour rule gives you mobility that does not translate into progress. Knowing the difference is the whole game.
Tarantula is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Spider variant, and its class is a single line: swap the row stack for one that accepts by rank but lifts by colour. The implementation detail is worth stating because it is easy to misread the game as "Spider where colour matters". It is the opposite. Colour matters less than suit does in Spider; what a card may land on has not changed at all.
That split — one rule for what may land, a stricter one for what may travel — is the defining feature of this whole family, and the reason the engine behind these games keeps the two apart deliberately. In Spider you drop onto any suit and lift only one suit. Tarantula widens the lifting rule to a colour; Black Widow removes it entirely and lets any descending run travel. The three games sit on one board as a ladder of exactly that one rule, and playing them in order shows what it is worth.
The goal never moves, which is what stops any of them from becoming trivial. A collected set is thirteen cards of a single suit in every member of the family, so all the extra freedom buys you is better access to the cards you still have to sort.
For the strict original, play Spider; for a one-deck version of the same idea, Spiderette. For the same board with the ranks wrapping from Ace round to King, try Grounds for a Divorce.
One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Tarantula 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. Structurally it should sit between Spider and Black Widow: easier to move cards than the first, harder to finish than the second suggests, because the collecting rule is identical in all three.
By one rule. In Spider a sequence only travels as a unit when every card shares a suit; in Tarantula it is enough that they share a colour. The deal, the board, the drop rule and the collecting rule are all Spider's, unchanged.
No. A completed set is thirteen cards of a single suit, King down to Ace, in every game of this family. A red run mixes hearts and diamonds, so it can be moved around freely but will never come off the board.
Any card one rank lower, of any suit at all. That part is Spider's rule and it does not change here — the colour restriction applies only to lifting a sequence, never to placing a single card.
Any card, or any run you are allowed to lift. There is no King rule in this family, which makes an empty column the most flexible thing on the board — and the stock will not deal while one is open.
It deals one card onto every column at once, five times in total, and there is no redeal. It also refuses to deal while any column is empty, so you must fill a gap before you can take a new row.
Only as a tool. A long red run lifts a lot of cards in one move, which is useful for reaching hidden cards, but it must be split by suit before either half can be collected. Split early — it costs far less.