If you are not familiar with the rules of Spider, you should click on "Rules" below.
After you have played and wish to quit, save your state in a player file. You may have as many of these as you wish, but they are designed to keep track of your current game, your preferences, and your statistics.
In the future you will want to start spider by opening this player file from the finder.The File menu supports the following activities:
New Player - switch to a new player file (to be named later).
Old Player - switch to an existing player file.
Save - save the current state on the player file without quitting.
Save As - save the current state on a different player file.
Revert - discard play and reload the player file from the last saved version.The Edit menu support Undo and redo.
The buffer provided for undo and redo should be large enough to contain an entire game.The Spider Menu contains the following items:
Deal Layer - the same as clicking on the undealt cards on the bottom left of the window.
New Game - stop trying to win the current game and hope for better luck with a new shuffle (in other words, lose).
Claim Win - skip all of the reorganization required to get the last few suits out, and call this game a win anyway. This cannot be done until 4 of the 8 suits are out and all cards are face up.The Preferences menu permits you to set various options within Spider as follows:
Always save - when checked suppresses the dialog box asking whether you wish to save changes on your player file.
Sound - when checked allows you to hear the computer shuffling and moving cards, etc.
Peeking - when checked permits the Undo command on the Edit menu to undo plays that most people would consider cheating to undo (peeking). If you like to undo but don't want to cheat, uncheck this option.Variant - when checked allows you to play a variant form of Spider in which only 40 cards are layed out face down to start. The extra 4 cards are dealt out at the end of the game as a separate layer. This variant may be slightly easier to win, but is less traditional.
Card Backs - allows you to select any two of eight card decks. This has only aesthetic value.
Table Top - allows you to select the table to play on. This is also purely for aesthetics. This option is not available in monochrome.Notes on the cards:
These cards were hand drawn in a very time-consuming process. Like the rest of Spider, they are licensed to be used, not copied.
Spider is notorious for generating very long piles of cards, and in order to fit these piles on the screen, the suit marks had to be placed next to the numbers rather than below them.Notes on monochrome support:
Spider was designed to run in color on a Mac II. However, it is a great deal of fun to play, and I felt it was unfair leave Mac Plus and SE owners out in the cold. The great graphics are missing, but the game is still there.
Because Spider requires such a large playing surface, the cards had to be made much less legible than I like in order to fit on the smaller screen.
