FreeCell

How to play FreeCell

FreeCell is played with a standard 52-card deck dealt into eight cascades, with four free cells and four foundations above them. The goal is the same as Klondike — build each suit up from Ace to King on the foundations — but the character of the game is completely different, because every card is dealt face up. There is nothing hidden and nothing random left to come. It is a pure planning puzzle, and almost every deal can be won if you find the right line.

In the cascades you build downward in alternating colours: a red six goes on a black seven, a black five on a red six. Each free cell holds exactly one card, and any card can be parked there. An empty cascade will accept any card at all, which makes empty columns the most valuable resource on the board.

The supermove rule — the part most people get wrong

Strictly, FreeCell only ever lets you move one card at a time. What looks like moving a run of five cards is really five separate moves using your empty cells and columns as staging. That means the number of cards you can shift at once is not fixed — it is calculated:

(free cells + 1) × 2^{(empty columns)}

With all four cells free and no empty columns, you can move five cards. Free up one column as well and it doubles to ten. This is why experienced players guard their empty space so carefully, and why filling a column with a King you did not need can quietly lose you the game. This board does the arithmetic for you — if a run will not move, you have run out of capacity.

Strategy tips

• Find the Aces before you touch anything. Look at where all four Aces are buried and work out which is hardest to reach. Plan that route first; everything else follows.
• Empty columns beat empty cells. A free cell adds one to your capacity. An empty column doubles it. Given the choice, clear the column.
• Don't fill cells you can't empty. A card parked in a cell is dead weight until somewhere accepts it. Two or three occupied cells is usually the point where a game quietly becomes unwinnable.
• Send low cards up early, high cards late. Aces and Twos are safe on the foundations immediately. Hold back higher cards — a red seven still in play may be exactly what a black eight needs.
• Use Undo freely. FreeCell rewards exploration. Trying a line, seeing it dead-end and stepping back is how the game is meant to be played.

About these deals

New Deal serves a numbered board from a pre-verified pool — each one has been run through a solver and confirmed winnable with four free cells, so you never waste time on a dead shuffle. The deal number is shown in the toolbar. Playing with two cells or one uses the same board but is a much harder puzzle and is not guaranteed to be solvable.

A little history

FreeCell was devised in its modern form by Paul Alfille in 1978 on the PLATO computer system, building on older "eight off" patience games. It reached a mass audience when Microsoft bundled it with Windows from 1995 onward. The Windows version's 32,000 numbered deals became famous when players collectively set out to solve every one — and found that exactly one, deal #11982, is impossible.

Frequently asked questions

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