Play Black Widow Solitaire — Move Anything, Collect Only Suits

Black Widow is Spider with the run rule removed altogether. Any descending sequence lifts as a unit, no matter how many suits it contains — a Jack of hearts on a Queen of clubs on a King of spades travels as one block. What has not changed is the goal: a set only leaves the board when it is thirteen cards of a single suit, King down to Ace. So the whole difficulty moves. You are never stuck for a move; you are stuck for a move that sorts anything. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Black Widow?

Goal: collect all eight suit runs, King down to Ace.

Setup

• Decks: two standard decks, 104 cards.
• Tableau: ten columns holding 54 cards — the first, fourth, seventh and tenth get six, the rest five. Only the last card of each column is face up.
• Stock: the remaining 50 cards, dealt as five rows of ten. No redeal.
• Scoreboard: eight slots, one for each completed set.

Rules

• Place a card on any card one rank higher, whatever its suit.
• Any descending sequence travels as a unit, regardless of suits or colours. Only the ranks have to run in order.
• An empty column takes any card or any run.
• A run of thirteen cards in ONE SUIT, King down to Ace, is collected off the board automatically. A mixed run of thirteen is not a set and stays where it is.
• The stock deals one card onto every column at once, and will not deal while any column stands empty.
• You win when all eight sets have been collected.

Black Widow Strategy

Freedom of movement is not progress. In this game the two come apart completely, and beginners lose by mistaking one for the other.

• Never build a long mixed run for its own sake. It looks like an achievement and it is a trap: those thirteen tidy cards cannot be collected, and every one of them has to be taken apart again. Build mixed runs only when the move gains you something specific.
• Sort as you go. The right instinct is to keep like suits together from the first move, using the free run move to shuttle blocks out of the way. If you find yourself with a fifteen-card descending column of four suits, you have made the game harder than Spider, not easier.
• Spend the freedom on hidden cards. Thirty-four dealt cards start face down. Because you can pick up almost anything, you can nearly always clear a column top — so use that to expose cards rather than to make the board look neat.
• Keep a column empty before you deal. An empty column will hold any run at all here, which is enormously powerful. But the stock refuses to deal while one is open, so the rhythm is: clear a column, use it, refill it, deal.
• Count the five rows. Every deal drops ten cards onto your careful arrangement. Get the suits you are close to finishing to the bottom of columns you will not disturb, then deal.

Black Widow, or Scarab

Black Widow is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as a Spider variant, with Scarab recorded as an alternative name. Its implementation is a small piece of careful engineering worth describing, because it is precisely the game's design: the row stack is built from a rank-only sequence class, which makes both the drop and the lift ignore suit — and then exactly one method is overridden back to Spider's version, the one that decides whether a completed set may leave the board. Everything loosens except the goal.

That is what makes the game more than an easy-mode Spider. Removing the run restriction does not remove any work; it moves the work from execution to planning. In Spider a badly built column is hard to construct in the first place. In Black Widow it is effortless to construct and just as hard to undo, so the discipline the rules used to impose has to come from the player instead.

It sits at one end of a three-game ladder on an identical board. Spider lifts only same-suit runs; Tarantula lifts same-colour runs; Black Widow lifts anything. One rule, three settings, and three genuinely different games — because that rule governs every move you make.

For a one-deck game on the same idea, play Spiderette. For the same two-deck board with the ranks wrapping from Ace round to King, try Grounds for a Divorce. For three packs and thirteen columns, Big Spider.

One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates Black Widow mostly skill, and no published win rate for it that we can reach carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. It is usually described as easier than Spider, which is fair — but the margin is smaller than the rules suggest, because the collecting rule never changed.