FreeCell Solitaire

FreeCell uses one standard deck of 52 cards with no jokers. Every suit runs A, 2, 3 … 10, J, Q, K, with aces low and kings high. Spades and clubs are black, hearts and diamonds are red.

The deal goes row by row, left to right, into eight columns: the four columns on the left get seven cards each and the four on the right get six. Every card is dealt face up, so from the first second of a deal you can see exactly where every card is. That is the big difference between FreeCell Solitaire and games such as Klondike, which hide cards and hold a stock in reserve.

Above the columns sit two groups of slots. On the left are the four free cells, each of which holds at most one card — think of them as parking spaces. On the right are the four foundations, one per suit, built upward from the ace to the king. Both groups start empty. The game is also written as two words, Free Cell, and belongs to the family of one-player card games known as Patience.

Columns are built downward in alternating colours: a red 7 goes on a black 8, a black 9 on a red 10. Only colour and rank matter, never the exact suit. The legal moves are:

• send the bottom card of a column into any empty free cell;
• move the card in a free cell back onto a column, or up to a foundation;
• send the bottom card of a column to a foundation, or onto another column that fits the building rule;
• move a whole ordered run from one column to another (see the next section).

An empty column accepts any card, not just a king, which makes empty columns one of the most valuable resources in the game. Foundations, on the other hand, only take cards in: once a card is home it stays there, and the only way to bring it back to the table is to undo the move. Moving a card from one free cell to another achieves nothing, so it is not offered as a move.

An illegal drop springs the card back where it came from and shows a short line explaining why, so a misplaced tap never changes the board.

Moving a run looks like a special power — players usually call it a supermove — but it is really just a series of single-card moves: empty free cells and empty columns act as staging posts. The game performs all of those shuffles for you, counts the whole thing as one move, and undoes it in one step.

The limit is exact: (number of empty free cells + 1) × 2 to the power of the number of empty columns. With all four cells free and no empty column you can shift five cards; one empty column makes it ten, two empty columns make it twenty. If you move the run into an empty column, that column can no longer be used as a staging post, so the limit is worked out from the remaining empty ones.

The status bar shows the current limit as a live "Move N" counter. When the run you have picked is longer than the limit, the panel says so directly, the destination refuses the drop, and the game tells you that there are not enough free cells or empty columns. The run itself must also be a clean sequence of alternating colours going down in rank; if it is broken in the middle, move it in several pieces.

Tap a card to select it, then tap the destination, or simply drag it across. When the bottom card of a column — or a card sitting in a free cell — can go home right now, a single tap sends it straight to its foundation with no selection step.

To take a run from the middle of a column, press and hold on that column. A small panel opens showing how many cards go with the card you are on; without lifting your finger, slide onto the up or down arrow to change the starting card, then lift to confirm. Confirming only selects the run, it never moves anything on its own, so you still tap the destination column or drag the run there. The panel has a close button in its corner, and Escape cancels it without touching the board.

With a keyboard, the left and right arrows move the focus between free cells, foundations and columns, the up and down arrows choose the starting card of a run inside a column, and Enter or the space bar selects a card, drops it, or sends it home when it can go. Escape clears the current selection. Four shortcuts cover the rest: U undoes, H asks for a hint, N deals a new game and F runs auto finish.

You win when all four foundations run from ace to king and all 52 cards are home. There is no time limit, no score and no penalty for thinking: the results panel shows your time, your number of moves, how many cards are home, and the deal ID, which you can copy with one tap. Its exits are a new deal, a replay of this deal, and a look at the final board.

If all four free cells are occupied and no card can go home or onto another column, the deal really has no legal move left. The game says so immediately and offers three ways out: undo the last move, replay this deal, or start a new one. Undo is unlimited, so you can always back up to an earlier branch and try a different line; you never have to reload the page to keep playing.

Press Hint and the game points out a useful move and marks it on the table. If the position you are in has been proven to have no solution, the hint bar says exactly that and offers four exits — undo, hint, replay deal and another deal. It never declares you the loser and never ends the deal for you. In a tangled position the bar first shows that it is still checking for a solution while the table stays fully playable, and any move you make interrupts the search. When no verdict can be reached in time, you simply get a sensible suggested move; an unfinished search is never reported as "no solution".

As soon as the remaining cards can all be sent home using nothing but column-bottom and free-cell moves, the third button on the toolbar changes from New deal to Auto finish. Tap it and the cards fly home one by one; tap it again to stop instantly and carry on by hand. Each card that auto finish sends home counts as a move and can be undone one step at a time.

New deal starts a fresh set of cards. To play the same cards again, use Replay deal on the results panel or on the hint bar. A Rules link on the table jumps to this how-to section. Switching to another browser tab pauses the clock and returns to it when you come back, and rotating the device, resizing the window or going full screen keeps the deal you are playing exactly as it was.

The game is named after the four "free cells" in the corner of the table. It was invented by Paul Alfille, who wrote the first computer version in 1978 as a medical student at the University of Illinois, on the PLATO educational computer system. The rules are an adaptation of an older patience game that built its columns in a single suit; by switching to alternating colours, Alfille turned a frustrating puzzle into one that almost always has a solution, and that single change is why the game survived.

What made it famous was Microsoft, which has shipped an implementation of FreeCell with every release of Windows since 1995. For millions of players the eight columns and the four empty cells in the corner are simply what a computer card game looks like.

The first difference is information. Klondike hides cards and holds a stock, so you are always betting on what comes up next. FreeCell lays all 52 cards in front of you at the start, which means winning or losing is very nearly a matter of how well you plan. Nearly every random deal can be solved; among the 32,000 numbered deals of the classic Windows version, only the one numbered 11982 was shown to be unwinnable.

The second difference is resources. Instead of turning cards from a stock, you work with four free cells and whatever columns you can empty. They are storage and computing power at the same time: the fuller your cells, the fewer cards you can shift in one go, and the more locked the position becomes. That squeeze is where the tension of the game lives.

The third difference is the value of an empty column. In Klondike an empty column only takes a king; here it takes anything and it doubles how many cards you can move at once. Deciding when to clear a column, and what to put into it afterwards, often decides the whole deal.

A deal takes about ten minutes, and nearly every move is a small trade: which card to park first, which column to dig into, when to send the aces and twos up, whether it is worth four extra moves to empty a column. Because nothing is hidden, a loss is never bad luck and a win is genuinely yours. That is why a game invented for a 1970s teaching computer is still being played every day.

• Look before you move. At the start, find the aces and twos and plan the route that digs them out before touching anything.
• A free cell is a debt. Every occupied cell cuts the size of the run you can shift, so know where a parked card will go before you park it.
• Empty a column before you rush cards home. A move that clears a column is usually worth more than one extra card on a foundation, because it loosens every move that follows.
• Keep some low cards on the table. A 3 or a 4 is often still needed as a landing spot; sending it home too early can block a column for good.
• Dig into the long columns first. Aces buried at the bottom of a seven-card column are the hard part of the deal; the sooner they come out, the fewer cells you burn later.
• When you are stuck, undo. Undo has no limit, so backing up to the last branching point beats forcing a bad line — that is how a full-information game is meant to be played.