FreeCell

FreeCell: the thinking player's solitaire

Most solitaires make you gamble. Klondike hides half the deck face down and Golf can deal you a course with no path through it, but FreeCell puts all 52 cards on the table face up before your first move. There is no stock, no waste, no hidden information at all — just eight columns, four empty cells, and a position that is almost always solvable by someone patient enough to find the way. That's the game's famous promise and its quiet threat: when you lose at FreeCell, you usually can't blame the cards.

Where FreeCell comes from

FreeCell's ancestor is a suit-building game described by C. L. Baker and popularized when Martin Gardner featured it in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American in June 1968. A decade later, medical student Paul Alfille made one change — building the columns in alternating colors instead of in suit, which makes far more deals solvable — and programmed the result in 1978 on PLATO, the University of Illinois' pioneering computer-education system. It was one of the first solitaires anyone ever played on a screen.

The version the world knows arrived when Jim Horne implemented FreeCell for Microsoft. It shipped in an Entertainment Pack before becoming one of the standard Windows games from Windows 95 onward, complete with its famous 32,000 numbered deals. In 1994, volunteers in the Internet FreeCell Project set out to solve every one of them by hand — and managed all but a single stubborn layout, deal #11982, which remains unsolvable to this day.

That reputation is what makes it a different experience from every other game in this family. Klondike is a game of managed luck — half the deck is face down and the stock feeds you cards in an order you can't control. FreeCell hides nothing and has no stock at all: after the deal, there is no randomness left in the game. If Klondike is poker, FreeCell is chess. The deal sets the puzzle; it doesn't decide the outcome.

The objective

Move all 52 cards onto the four foundations, one per suit, built upward from Ace to King. Win the maneuvering war in the columns and the foundations take care of themselves.

Setup

• The tableau is eight columns dealt from a single shuffled deck, entirely face up — the first four columns get seven cards, the last four get six.
• Four free cells sit above the tableau, each able to hold any single card, parked there for as long as you like.
• Four foundations start empty and collect each suit in order, Ace first.

How moves work

1. Build the columns down in alternating colors. A card moves onto a card one rank higher of the opposite color — a red 6 on a black 7.
2. Any card can go to an empty free cell, and a card in a cell can come back down onto any legal column (or go straight to its foundation). Cells hold exactly one card each.
3. Any card can start an empty column. Unlike Klondike, you're not restricted to Kings — an empty column is a wildcard space, the most valuable real estate in the game.
4. Aces go up as they're freed, and each foundation builds upward in its own suit. Double-click a card here to send it to its foundation.
5. Formally, you move one card at a time. Moving a whole ordered run is really a chain of single moves through cells and empty columns, so the number of cards you can relocate at once is limited: (1 + empty free cells) × 2 for each empty column. With all four cells free and no empty columns you can move a run of five; fill your cells and that shrinks to one. This board performs the shuffling for you as a single "supermove," but it enforces the same limit — and moving into an empty column costs you that column's doubling.

Read down the table rather than across it and the game's whole strategy falls out of it: a free cell adds one to your capacity, while an empty column doubles it. That is why an empty column is worth going a long way out of your way for, and why filling your last cell "just for a second" is so often the move that loses the deal.

Strategy that actually matters

• Plan before you touch anything. All the information is on the table, so the opening minute of a FreeCell game is reading, not moving. Find the Aces and 2s, see what's on top of them, and work out the first few exchanges before you start.
• Free the Aces and 2s early. Low cards buried under three layers of face cards are the deals that go wrong. Most of your early moves should be excavation work toward them.
• Treat free cells as scaffolding, not storage. Every occupied cell cuts your biggest-move size and your options. Park a card only when you know how it's coming back down — a full set of cells with no plan is how FreeCell games die.
• Work toward an empty column. An empty column is strictly better than a free cell: it holds a whole run, doubles your supermove capacity, and accepts any card. Emptying one column, even at some cost, often cracks the whole deal open.
• Don't strip one suit to the foundations too fast. You may still need that black 5 in play to hold a red 4. Sending cards up the moment they're legal can leave the tableau without the in-between cards it needs; keep the foundations roughly level until the endgame is clearly won.
• Build on high cards reluctantly. A run stacked on a King goes nowhere until the game is nearly over. When you have the choice, build on cards you'll eventually be able to move as a unit.

Common variations

Baker's Game is the original: identical layout, but columns build down in suit rather than alternating colors — noticeably harder, with around one deal in four unsolvable. Eight Off, an older cousin, deals eight cells and also builds in suit. Relaxed FreeCell drops the supermove limit and lets any ordered run move regardless of free space, which turns near-losses into wins and suits players who find the capacity rule fussy. You'll also meet two-cell and one-cell FreeCell — the standard game with fewer cells, played as a deliberate challenge by players for whom four cells has become too safe. This page plays the classic rules: four cells, alternating colors, honest supermove math.