Diplomat Solitaire: the two-deck game next to easy Spider
Diplomat shares Spider's size: two full decks, 104 cards. But the similarity ends there. Diplomat deals just 32 cards to the table, in eight short columns of four, all face up. The other 72 wait in a stock that you turn one card at a time, and you get one trip through it. Your goal is to fill eight foundations, one per suit per deck, from Ace to King.
On our difficulty ladder, Diplomat lands just below one-suit Spider, the easiest rung. Our computer player, which does not know the order of the stock and never undoes a move, won 47.9% of 2,000 deals, a whisker behind one-suit Spider's 52.8% and a little ahead of classic Klondike's 42.3%. For a two-deck game with a single pass through the stock, that is surprisingly friendly.
This page shows where Diplomat sits, how it works on this site, what our results suggest, and how the study was carried out.
Where Diplomat ranks
| Game | Our computer player won | Deals | 95% range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spider, 1 suit | 52.8% | 4,000 | 51.2–54.3% |
| Diplomat (this page) | 47.9% | 2,000 | 45.7–50.0% |
| Solitaire, Turn 1 | 42.3% | 10,000 | 41.3–43.3% |
| Spider, 2 suits | 5.7% | 4,000 | 5.0–6.5% |
Each game has its own computer player, so this is a guide rather than an exact ranking. What makes Diplomat stand out is how far our player got even when it lost: on average it placed 76 of the 104 cards on the foundations per game. Most Diplomat games end close to the finish line, win or lose.
We know of no published study that measures Diplomat, so there is nothing to compare these figures with. Our player is a floor: a person who plans ahead and uses Undo should do better.
Diplomat rules on spidersolitaire.us
- Cards: two decks, 104 cards.
- Layout: eight columns of four cards, all face up.
- Stock: 72 cards, turned one at a time onto a waste pile. There is no second pass.
- Foundations: eight, each built up in suit from Ace to King.
- Building: down by one rank, any suit or color.
- Moving: one card at a time. You cannot move a run as a block.
- Empty columns: any card can go in.
Diplomat tips drawn from 2,000 games
The stock is a one-way street
With no second pass, every card you turn and cannot use stays on the waste until something opens up. Before turning the next card, make every useful move on the table. Our player turned a stock card only when no table move improved its position.
An Ace at the start is a coin flip
49.2% of our deals had an Ace ready to play straight from the opening columns. Don't worry if yours has none; the stock is where most Aces come from.
Empty columns are flexible here
Unlike Klondike, any card can fill a space in Diplomat. That makes a cleared column a great place to park a card you need to get out of the way.
Build loosely, but think about the foundations
Building down in any suit is easy, but foundations need suits in order. A long mixed build is fine as long as you can peel it off one card at a time when those cards are needed.
Settle in for a long game
Games our player won took about 351 moves, counting each stock card turned. With 104 cards and 72 of them in the stock, Diplomat is the longest game on this site by that measure.
Features on spidersolitaire.us
Diplomat is free to play in any modern browser on computer, tablet or phone, with no download, account, sign-up or email address. You get large clear cards and a zoom control, a Hint button, unlimited Undo, Restart, Auto Play, and drag-and-drop or tap to move. Wins, time and moves are tracked for the current game; sound can be switched off; fullscreen and table colors are available.
Behind the numbers: how we ran the study
The spidersolitaire.us team ran this study in September 2026 to place Diplomat on the same ladder as Spider.
- Started from the code that runs our game. 104 cards, eight face-up columns of four, a 72-card stock turned one card at a time with no second pass, building down regardless of suit, single-card moves only, and any card allowed into an empty column.
- Rebuilt Diplomat as a program following exactly those rules.
- Dealt numbered hands. Deals 1 to 2,000, each from a fixed seed, so repeating the test gives the same cards.
- Chose the player. A program that looks a short way ahead over the table and waste, does not know what is coming from the stock, and never undoes. That makes its result a floor for a careful human. We did not build a solver that knows the stock order for Diplomat.
- Played all 2,000 deals to the end.
- Looked for published research. The study we use elsewhere, Blake and Gent (2026), does not cover Diplomat, and we found no other published figure to compare with.
- Calculated the margin of error. For 47.9%, the 95% range is 45.7% to 50.0%.
- Stated the limits. Without a published figure or a solver, we have no independent check on this number. It tells you how one reasonable program does, not how often a deal can be won.
The code behind the ladder
We wrote the simulation in Python 3.11 with the standard library alone; Diplomat is the diplomat.py module. Each turn, the player looks up to 300 positions ahead over table and waste moves and scores them: a big reward for each card on a foundation, a penalty for each card sitting on top of a lower card, small rewards for links and empty columns, and a small penalty for each card on the waste. It turns the next stock card only when no table move improves that score. The 2,000 games took about 14 minutes across 19 worker processes on a 20-core machine.
We calculated the 95% range with the Wilson score method. Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, helped us write and review the code and draft this page. The figures did not come from the AI: every one is the output of running the program, and the team checked them before publication.
Ladder questions, answered with data
Is Diplomat like Spider?
It uses two decks like Spider, but everything on the table starts face up and you move one card at a time. By our numbers, it plays about as easily as one-suit Spider.
Why only one pass through the stock?
That is how Diplomat works on this site. It keeps the game from dragging on and makes each stock card count.
Why can't I move a group of cards?
Diplomat only allows single-card moves. Use empty columns to shuffle cards into place.
How close do I usually get?
Our player averaged 76 of 104 cards home per game, so most games end with most cards placed.
What else is similar?
For a one-deck game with a stock, try classic Solitaire. For a two-deck challenge, move up to two-suit Spider. Browse the rest on the games page.
By Admin, spidersolitaire.us. Research run September 2026.