Spiderette
Screen shot of the game Spiderette from Pretty Good Solitaire.
Spiderette is a one deck solitaire game of the Spider type. It is a sort of one deck version of Spider, with a bit of Klondike thrown in.
There are seven tableau piles. At the start of the game, one card is dealt to the first pile, two cards are dealt to the second pile, and so on until seven cards are dealt to the seventh pile. Only the top card of each pile is face up. This gives a tableau like Klondike. The remainder of the cards form a stock.
Within the tableau, building is down regardless of suit. Groups of cards can only be moved if they are in sequence down in suit, like Spider. An empty tableau pile can be filled by any card or legal group of cards. When no more building is possible, one card is dealt to each tableau pile as in Spider (the last deal from the stock will only have 3 cards, these are dealt to the leftmost three tableau piles).
The object is to build 13 card sequences from King down to Ace in suit, as in Spider. The game is won if you can get the tableau to just contain the 4 13-card suit sequences. In this objective it is like the game Scorpion.
Strategy is Spiderette is much like Spider. Because you can only move cards in suit sequences, building by suit in the tableau is always preferred. Spaces should be created as quickly as possible and used to bring more cards into play.
Using these rules Spiderette can be won 5-10% of the time. A common variation is to allow moving of groups of cards regardless of suit (a sort of one suit Spiderette, often called Baby Spiderette). With these relaxed rules the game can be won nearly every time.
Spiderette was named by Albert H. Morehead and Geoffrey Mott-Smith in the first half of the 20th century, but was apparently already a well known game at that time.
Spiderette is one of the 740 games in Pretty Good Solitaire, one of the 101 games in Goodsol Solitaire 101, one of the 30 games in Most Popular Solitaire, and one of the 16 games in Spider Wizard.
