m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

I was reading some back issues of The New Abstract Games when I came across my JavaScript implementation of the Decktet solitaire game Myrmex, mentioned in an article on Spider variants. The author only includes the “larval stage” of Myrmex, though he mentions there are others, before going into other variant decks for Spider. Most of these inspired new rules to compensate for the perceived difficulty of playing with the particular variant deck.

Starfish is the most like a traditional Spider, using six suits plus some joker shenanigans. Note that some time ago, Jan Wolter invented an eight-suit Spider (Mondo Spider) with no extra rules, though he did turn a lot of the tableau face-up and called the game “rather arduous”.