EclectEcon

Matt Braskey recently wrote to me about the solitaire game, Spider, about which I blogged a couple of years ago. I wrote, in part,

... [W]hat happens in Spider solitaire when you run out of cards in the piles across the top and the game won't let you deal any new cards because each column or slot must have at least one card in it [?]

Matt wrote,

I encountered the spider stalemate that you wrote about in your
blog about two years ago. Your blog seems to be one of the only
places that detail it. What an interesting scenario!

He also sent this screen shot, which (after you click on it) is much clearer than the one I posted back then.

As I wrote back then, this doesn't seem as if it should be called a loss. Rather, it seems like a stalemate to me.

However, once you know this is how the game works, if you want to win, you must avoid running out of cards this way.