Index of Spider Help Topics

Cheating

Enhancements

Game Objective

Game Status

Hints and tricks

Menus, buttons, and keys

Moving cards

Scoring


Game status

The status of the game or the last action attempted is displayed in the menu bar at the top of the game's window.  Look here for information about what was last attempted and the result.


Enhancements in the works

There are a number of different enhancements to Spider that are in the works.  Various deck patterns will be available for the backs of the cards along with some sort of new cursor to give feedback that the user is in the 'drag' mode.  Highlighting the sub-CCISS in some way would also help when dragging a broken CCISS manually.  Finally I'm working on some sort of fanfare graphics for a completed game.

Please send any feedback, suggestions, or ideas about this program to the following:

William Bollenbacher

9248 Pipilo St.

S.D., CA 92127

619-538-2483

email: starbird@netcom.com

Enjoy,  wc


Menus, buttons, and keys

There is a Play menu from which you can choose to start a 'New game', 'Deal' 10 more cards (one per stack), backup the game with 'Undo move', or 'Exit' the program.  You can use the keyboard for 3 of these.  Use 'n' or 'N' for a new game, 'd' or 'D' for the next deal, and 'u' or 'U' or undoing the last move.  You can also request the next deal by clicking the left mouse button while the cursor is on top of the deck in the upper left corner of the card table.

There is also a Configure menu where you can control cheating and scoring.

The left and right mouse buttons are used to move a CCISS as discribed in the Moving cards Moving_cards section of the help information.


Scoring

Scoring is not allowed if cheating is enabled, and you can't turn on scoring after the first move of a game has been made.

The Configure menu has a Scoring sub-menu which allows you to enable or disable scoring.  With scoring enabled you get 75 points for each new CCISS you creat through combining cards and other CCISSs.  When you creat a full suit CCISS you get an additional 350 points for a total of 1250 for each full suit CCISS.  This gives a total of 10,000 points if you can combine all of the cards into 8 full suit CCISSs.  But you loose points by moving a CCISS off of the playing area to the storage area above; 1250 for the first one removed, 1000 for the second one, and 750 for the third one.  Since removing three full suit CCISSs from the playing area almost ensures the completion of the rest of the suits, no more points are subtracted.  Thus you will get 7,000 points if you remove three or more of the full suit CCISSs, and you will get the full 10,000 points only if all full suit CCISSs remain on the playing area; something I've done only a couple of times, without cheating, after playing hundreds of games.


CCISS

A stack of consecutive cards, all in the same suit, is called a CCISS; which is pronounced kiss (Consecutive Cards In the Same Suit).  A CCISS may be moved as a block, as if it where a single card (note: a single card is just the smallest CCISS).


Game objective

Spider uses two decks of cards, giving a total of 8 suits.  The object of the game is to stack all 8 suits consecutively from King down to Ace with the King under the Queen and so forth.  There are 10 playing stacks which the player uses to stack the face up cards.  You may move a CCISS to another stack if the bottom card on the destination stack is the next higher card, regardless of it's suit.  The game begins by dealing cards face down in each of the 10 stacks with a single face up card on top of each stack.  Stacks 1, 4, 7, and 10 get 5 face down cards and the other stacks get 4, so that a total of 54 cards are dealt.  This leaves 50 cards in the deck, which is displayed in the upper left corner, to be dealt face up, one per stack per deal, for a total of 5 deals.  The player may request a deal at any time, but will usually do so only after making all the moves that can be made with the present set of face up cards.  Each time a face down card is uncovered in a stack by a move it is turned face up.  Empty stacks result when all face down cards in a stack have been turned face up and moved to another stack.  These are very useful and are discussed in more detail in Hints and tricks.


Stack shadow

The stack shadow is the area below the top of a stack within the verticle edges of the sides of the stack (note: the shadow extends all the way down to the bottom of the window).


Moving cards

There are several ways to select and move a CCISS from a stack.  The easiest is to simply click the left mouse button within the stack's shadow.  The game will attempt to find the first stack, starting from the left, that can accept the CCISS off the top of the stack whose shadow the cursor is on.  If you wish the CCISS to move to particular stack then you hold down the left mouse button and drag the cursor to the destination stack's shadow.  A CCISS is moved as a unit unless you select a sub-CCISS of it intentionally.  To select sub-CCISS off the top of a CCISS use the right mouse button and place the cursor on the card where you wish to break the CCISS.  You can simply click the right mouse button to have the game try to find a destination stack, or you can drag the cursor to a specific stack's shadow.  An empty stack can accept any CCISS, so these are very useful for rearanging and building CCISSes.  You will want to try to create empty stacks as quickly and often as possible.


Cheating

Undoing moves is really cheating but when a new player is starting out it really helps to build up experience and intuition.  You can undo any move, even those that turn cards face up, but ofcourse this isn't how to play the game once your familiar with the different methods for playing and moving CCISSes.

The Configure menu has a Cheating sub-menu which allows you to select the level of cheating.  You can select to not allowing cheating (level 0), or to allow undoing moves that didn't turn over a card (level 1), or to allow undoing all moves (level 2).  In level 1 no information was gained, so this is not strictly cheating, but it's not allowed in conjunction with scoring.

After the first move of a game you can not reduce the level of cheating, only at the start of a new game before any card has been moved.  The level of cheating may be increased at any time in a game, but it will turn off scoring if it has been enabled.


Hints and tricks

The first hint is to try to open up empty stacks as soon and as often as possible.  Empty stacks allow the player to build larger and larger CCISSes out of smaller ones, until a full suit can be grouped together and moved to the holding area above the stacks; freeing up area below.  After a deal, take a minute to decide if there are any stacks that can be emptied before starting to move other cards.  Next group any cards from the same suit into CCISSes.  Then start stacking the highest valued cards first, since placing cards on these will block them from being moved later; work down to the lower cards.  There are times when breaking CCISSes is the only easy way to combine cards.  One is when you have 2 CCISSes that together contain all the cards in a suit but which overlap in cards so one cannot be placed on top of the other.  Use the right mouse button to break the lower CCISS at the card that can be placed on the upper CCISS to form a complete suit.  Another is if you have 2 CCISSes in 2 different stacks that could be combined into a larger one but both of them are blocked by other cards on top of them.  If you have only one empty stack then you may be able to move the cards blocking the lower CCISS to the empty stack, move a sub-CCISS off of this CCISS to some other stack, move the cards that you placed in the empty stack on top of this sub-CCISS, move the cards blocking the higher CCISS to the empty stack, and then move the remainder of the lower CCISS to the stack where it can be combined with the higher CCISS.