Free Spider Solitaire 2012

Free Spider Solitaire offers five different variations on one of the most popular sub-genres of the solitaire card game. Anyone who grew up in the nineties is sure to recognize the old graphics of the Windows solitaire program. It was a ubiquitous presence on all Windows machines, packed in with every installation, and both office workers and kids lost hours of their time to a game that's intrinsically incredibly simple and able to be replicated with a simple deck of cards. Times have changed. Microsoft has long given up on packaging solitaire in its operating systems, and video games have advanced to a level where games surpassing solitaire by magnitudes can be played on our phones with little fuss. This leave's Free Spider Solitaire in an uncomfortable position. As a free to play game, Free Spider Solitaire offers a decent amount of content and a variety of classic takes on the solitaire formula. But many players will find that lack of a price tag still isn't worth the price of admission. For those looking for a sensible time waster or to jump down the nostalgia rabbit hole, they might find some entertainment here.

Players used to the traditional version of solitaire from their old PCs might be surprised to find that spider solitaire plays a little differently. While the goals are the same - to clear out columns of cards by stacking them in numerical order - some functional differences add some interesting wrinkles. In traditional spider solitaire, two decks are used, and when you run out of moves, the entire set of columns is filled with cards from the face down pile rather than one at a time. While this adds a level of complexity not present in traditional solitaire, it comes with some other factors to balance that. Suits are a non-issue in spider solitaire, for instance, so you don't have to worry about maintaining four different piles.

While that's the basics, this version of solitaire isn't content to rest on its laurels. It contains five different variations on the basic spider solitaire formula so that you can flex your skills with cards, and users can even adjust their difficulty settings to customize a game that matches their proficiency. The features may seem modest, but this is fundamentally just a game of cards, and TreeCardGames packs their software in with about everything you could expect from this kind of product. Particularly noteworthy is how smart the difficulty settings are, as they allow you to adjust the time of the game and the odds of winning in addition to more traditional difficulty settings. Users looking for a game of cards they can play alone will find plenty to like here, but you should temper your expectations by recognizing the developers aren't exactly blazing new territory here. They're building off a formula as old as personal computing, and while they do it about as well as you could expect from anyone, that formula is still well set.