Play Tarantula Solitaire — Spider, Loosened by Exactly One Shade

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.

How Do You Play Tarantula?

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. A black 7 goes on a red 8 or a black 8, both alike.
• A sequence travels as a unit only when it is all one colour. Red 9, red 8, red 7 moves together; red 9, black 8 does not.
• An empty column takes any card or any movable run.
• A run of thirteen cards in ONE SUIT, King down to Ace, is collected off the board automatically.
• 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.

Tarantula Strategy

The colour rule gives you mobility that does not translate into progress. Knowing the difference is the whole game.

• Sort by colour to manoeuvre, by suit to win. A long red run is a useful crane — it lifts a lot of cards in one move — but it is not a set and never will be. Use colour runs to reach hidden cards and to clear columns, and split them by suit before you get close to thirteen.
• Split a colour run early, not late. The moment a red run has hearts on top of diamonds, the hearts have to come off again before either suit can finish. Doing that while the run is three cards long costs one move; doing it at nine costs you the column.
• Turn hidden cards above everything else. Thirty-four of the fifty-four dealt cards start face down. Until they are visible you are not making a plan, you are guessing, and the colour rule makes it easy to spend ten moves without exposing anything.
• An empty column is worth more here than in Spider. Because bigger runs move, a space lets you relocate a genuinely large block. Keep one open when you can, and remember the stock refuses to deal while a column is empty — so fill it deliberately just before you deal.
• Count the five stock rows. Every row buries whatever you have arranged under ten new cards. Get your columns into a state you can recover from before you deal, not after.

Tarantula in the Spider Family

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.