Someone said that the least number of moves would be if every card played. That would be 8 x 12 or 96 moves. However, there are 50 cards in the draw pile, so if they play where they were dealt, then those moves would not count. In a perfect game, there would be only 46 moves.
Explanation: Mathematically, there are 8 suits of 13 cards or 104 total cards.
You deal 10 columns of 5 cards plus 4 more cards for 54 cards. A perfect deal would show 5 Kings and 5 sevens. There remains 50 cards in the draw pile. Since there are no plays, you can draw 5 times. The 5 deals in a perfect game would be first 5 queens and 5 sixes, then 5 jacks and 5 fives, then 5 tens and 5 fours, then 5 nines and 5 threes, and would end up with 5 eights and 5 twos. So far, you have made no moves but can now make your first 5 moves. Move the 5 stacks of 7 through 2 on top of the 5 stacks of 8s, and the 5 Aces will show up under them. Make your next 5 moves by moving the Aces on top of the twos and clearing the first 5 stacks. You have just removed 5 sets of 13 cards or 65 cards and only made 10 moves. There remains 39 cards. From this point as long as the 3 kings are on the bottom of the last 3 stacks and there is a way to get to them, you should be able to clear the cards in 36 more moves for a total of 46 moves.
If the least moves is 46… then the highest score should be 1254, but many are reporting higher scores. The score plus the number of moves is always a multiple of 100, so I did some investigation as to how to get these bonuses. Today I was able to get a score of 2562 in 438 moves for a total of 1700 bonus points.
Here is how to do it. Start to play a normal game, but don’t try to win… Try to make the last possible move a completion of a K-A run. If you do that, the game will award you the points, and then give you a chance to retry by undoing and trying again. The undo, will not take the 100 away. So just complete the run as many times as you want to get the highest score you want. I did it 17 times before I got bored, and then ran the undos back to where I could actually win the game.
I have scored 86 ten times, and better than that six times: three 85 moves, two 84 moves, and one 82 moves. I save screenshots whenever I score under 90 moves, but lost all of my Win 95 scores after that computer became unusable. I need to back these up more often.
As I have stated in an earlier post, there are too many coincidences for the deal to be random. There is a right way to play it, and that is to concentrate on the highest card on the first deal, and the longest stacks from the second deal on. The exception is that a king down stack supersedes that. When there are two equal choices always choose the one on the left. Never make a move that clears a stack before the last screen, because then you have to make an extra move to place a card or cards in its place to be able to continue dealing.
I have recently spent way too much time playing and thinking about Spider. I mostly used it as an excuse to learn Python to write a simulator to play the game with a strategy tuned to minimizing the number of moves used. Running millions of simulations I have achieved a low score of 83 with one color and 88 with two colors.
I then decided to look at what could be achieved with a perfectly stacked deck. I analysis concludes that a perfectly stacked hand could be played in 50 moves. The chances of this are extremely remote. I would attach the spreadsheet or screen shot, so here is a link to a screen shot on facebook. Stacked Deck Screen Shot
Is that for 2 color or 1? That would be crazy remarkable as it results in a score 0f 1250. I have been playing 2 color for many, many years and my high score is 1203. I have heard of games a bit higher then that but nothing even remotely close to 1250. I don’t think I have heard of a 2 color game over 1210.