At last! One-Click Spider Solitaire

Free, no-ads, open source and so much more fun!

Twenty years ago, I wrote a version of FreeCell where each move only required one click. After all, the cards know where they should go, right? I got serious push-back from my FreeCell addicted friends, but I notice today many versions work this way. Given how much the web has changed, I recently rewrote it as a Progressive Web App (PWA), and wrote about it here on Medium which you can play here.

But why not Spider? The logic is a bit more complex, what with cards flipping over, multiple decks, differing rules depending on how many suits are being used. As it turns out, however, it only took 310 lines of code vs. 395 in FreeCell. (Publicly available on github.com/jcoonrod, and you play it here).

My earlier article described the basics of a plain HTML and procedural JavaScript approach: generate cards as SVGs, “deal them” by appending them as child nodes.

The key to making it playable and fun is deciding the priority for where a stack of cards should move when you click on its top card. The answer: first see if it can stack on existing stacks — going first to the right (and then around), and if not, see if there is an open cascade where it can go.

Enjoy!