How to Play FreeCell

FreeCell in two sentences

FreeCell deals all 52 cards face up into eight columns and gives you four empty cells to park single cards in. You win by moving every card onto four foundation piles, one per suit, each built up from Ace to King.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is random once the cards are dealt, which makes FreeCell the rare solitaire game that is almost pure planning. Nearly every deal you are given can be won. Whether you win it is down to you.

• Play FreeCell free online, no sign-up

The board

• Eight tableau columns hold all 52 cards, face up. Columns 1 to 4 get seven cards each, columns 5 to 8 get six.
• Four free cells sit empty at the start. Each one holds exactly one card, of any rank or suit.
• Four foundations start empty. Each takes one suit and fills from Ace up to King.
• There is no stock and no discard pile. You never draw a card, and there is no redeal. Everything you will ever have is on the table from the first second.

The rules

• Tableau: build down in alternating colours. A black 7 accepts a red 6; a red 10 accepts a black 9.
• Empty columns take any card. Not just a King, which is the rule people carry over from Klondike and get wrong.
• Free cells: move any single exposed card into an empty cell at any time, from a column or a foundation.
• And back out again: a card parked in a cell can go to its foundation, or onto any column that accepts it.
• Foundations: play a card if it is the next rank up in the same suit. An Ace starts an empty foundation, then the 2, then the 3.
• Cards can come back off a foundation in our version, as in most web FreeCells — Microsoft’s did not allow it. Only the top card of a foundation can move. If you send a black 5 up early and later need it to hold a red 4, pull it back down onto a column, or park it in a cell until a column can take it.
• Moving several cards at once is allowed when there is room to do it one card at a time. That limit is the part worth understanding properly, below.

The supermove: how many cards you can really move

Dragging a sequence of four cards onto a column looks like one move, but the game is really shuffling those cards through your free cells and empty columns and stacking them back up on the other side. The run still has to be a perfect descending, alternating-colour sequence — that is what makes it a run. What your empty space decides is how long a run you can carry.

The rule underneath is simply this: a run can move if you could have moved it one card at a time using the empty cells and columns you currently have. Most implementations, ours included, turn that into a formula: (empty free cells + 1) × 2 raised to the number of empty columns. If the column you are moving onto is itself the empty one, subtract it from the count first, since you cannot stage cards in the space you are filling.

That exponent is the whole reason an empty column is the most valuable thing on the board. Four empty cells and no empty columns lets you move five cards. Four empty cells and two empty columns lets you move twenty. Meanwhile every card you leave sitting in a cell costs you one off the front of that multiplication — and the exponent multiplies the loss, so with two empty columns one occupied cell costs you four cards, not one.

• Four cells free, no empty column: 5 cards.
• Two cells free, no empty column: 3 cards.
• Two cells free, one empty column: 6 cards.
• Four cells free, two empty columns: 20 cards.

A worked opening: deal 1978, move by move

Here is a real deal from our game, opened six moves deep. You can load the same board and follow along — every Solitarium deal comes from a seed, and the link below carries this one. The number is our own seed, not Microsoft’s numbering: Microsoft’s deal 1978 is a completely different layout.

The deal starts like this, top card of each column on the right:

• Column 1: 2♣ 6♥ 9♠ 2♦ 5♣ A♥ 8♣
• Column 2: 10♦ J♠ 7♣ 9♣ J♥ K♥ 8♥
• Column 3: 6♣ J♦ 7♥ 3♣ 9♦ 10♥ 4♣
• Column 4: 3♠ 7♠ Q♠ 9♥ 7♦ A♠ A♣
• Column 5: Q♦ 3♥ J♣ A♦ K♠ 4♥
• Column 6: 2♥ Q♣ 6♦ 3♦ 5♠ 10♣
• Column 7: 10♠ 4♠ Q♥ K♣ 8♦ 5♦
• Column 8: 4♦ 5♥ K♦ 8♠ 2♠ 6♠

• Open deal 1978 and play it yourself

The first six moves, and why

Before touching anything, find the Aces. Column 4 is holding two of them on top of each other, the A♣ exposed and the A♠ directly underneath — that is a free start. The A♥ in column 1 is one card down, under the 8♣. The A♦ is the problem: it is buried in column 5 under the K♠ and the 4♥, and a King on top of a card is the worst thing that can happen to it. No tableau card can ever take a King, so until its own Queen is on the foundation it can only move to an empty column or into a cell — and a cell traps it there until a column opens.

• A♣ from column 4 to the club foundation. Free, and it exposes the next Ace.
• A♠ from column 4 to the spade foundation. Also free. Two suits open, nothing spent.
• 8♣ from column 1 into a free cell. There is no red 9 available to take it, so a cell is the only route to the Ace beneath. This is the first real cost of the game.
• A♥ from column 1 to the heart foundation. Three suits open for the price of one occupied cell.
• 6♠ from column 8 onto the 7♦ in column 4. Note what just happened: taking the two Aces off column 4 exposed the 7♦, which turned out to be exactly the home the 6♠ needed. This is why you look at what a move uncovers, not just what it moves.
• 2♠ from column 8 to the spade foundation, now that the 6♠ is off it. Spades are up to the 2.

Where that leaves you

Three foundations are open, spades are up to the 2, and you have spent exactly one free cell. Column 8 is down to four cards, which looks like your best candidate for the first empty column — until you look at what is in it. The K♦ has nowhere to go but a cell, and it will sit there until a column actually opens. Column 1 is one card longer, holds no King, and holds the 2♣ that clubs want next. That is the real choice from here.

It is also worth noticing what you can no longer do. With one cell occupied you can now move four cards at once instead of five. One card in one cell, and a fifth of your carrying capacity is gone. That is the trade you are making every time you park something, and it is why good FreeCell players empty cells as fast as they fill them.

The 2♣ is the awkward one from here. Clubs want it next and it is sitting at the very bottom of column 1, under four cards. Long-term, that column has to come apart.

Five habits that win more deals

• Look before you move. Every card is visible, so the information you need is already on screen. Find all four Aces and note what is on top of them before your first move.
• Keep cells empty, not full. Each occupied cell subtracts from how many cards you can move. A cell is a loan, not storage — take it knowing how you will pay it back.
• Chase an empty column above almost anything else. It doubles your carrying capacity, while a free cell only adds one to the number being doubled — and unlike a cell, a column can hold a whole ordered run. The shortest column is usually the one to attack.
• Do not rush cards to the foundations. A 4 sent up early cannot hold the 3 that is blocking your only useful column. The rule strong players use: a card is safe to send up once both opposite-colour cards one rank below it are already home, because nothing on the table can still need it. Everything else can wait.
• Watch for Kings on top of low cards. No tableau card can take a King, so until its Queen is home it can only go to an empty column or into a cell, where it then sits and blocks. A King on top of an Ace is a column you have to dismantle. Spot those early, because they decide the shape of the whole game.

Where FreeCell came from

FreeCell descends from Baker’s Game, which builds tableau runs in a single suit instead of alternating colours, and which in turn came out of an older game called Eight Off. In 1978 Paul Alfille, then a student at the University of Illinois, made one change to Baker’s Game: he let the tableau build down in alternating colours rather than by suit. Building on alternating colours gives almost every card somewhere to go, and that single change is what took the game from often unsolvable to almost always solvable.

Alfille wrote it for PLATO, the university’s educational computer system, in the TUTOR language. His version was more ambitious than most of what followed — it supported boards from four to ten columns and one to ten cells, kept ranked lists of the longest winning streaks, and ran tournaments on hand-picked deals. Control Data Corporation later shipped it across all PLATO systems.

Most people met the game much later, when Microsoft bundled a FreeCell with Windows. That version shipped with 32,000 numbered deals, and its help file claimed it was believed, though not proven, that every game was winnable. Players took that as a challenge.

Is every FreeCell deal winnable?

Almost, but not quite. Of Microsoft’s 32,000 numbered deals, every one is solvable except number 11982 — a result established by the volunteer Internet FreeCell Project, which split the deals between thousands of players in the mid-1990s. Number 11982 has since resisted every one of them and at least eight independent solver programs. That single deal is why the old "every game is winnable" claim is false.

For deals in general the odds are extraordinary. In 1994 Don Woods ran a solver over a million random FreeCell deals and, by his 1995 report, it had failed on only fourteen of them — a solvable rate of roughly 99.999%. Practically speaking, if you lose a deal, the deal was winnable and you misplayed it. That is either encouraging or annoying depending on the day.

Human win rates are far below 99.999%, and that gap is the whole game: the deal is almost never the reason you lost. Keep the cells empty, hunt for an empty column, and the gap closes fast.

How is FreeCell different from Klondike?

Klondike hides most of its cards, deals you a stock to draw from, and only lets a King start an empty column. You can play Klondike well and still lose to a deal that was never winnable, because the cards you needed were face down in the wrong order.

FreeCell shows you everything, gives you no stock, and lets any card start an empty column. There is no luck after the shuffle and no information you are missing, so a loss is a mistake rather than a bad draw. The cost is that FreeCell asks you to think several moves ahead, where Klondike often just asks you to keep drawing.

• Play Klondike Solitaire and compare

Why is it called FreeCell?

The name comes from the four cells at the top of the board, which are "free" in the sense of unrestricted: any single card can go into any empty one, regardless of suit or rank, and come back out when you need it. They are the only part of the board with no ordering rule at all, and the entire difficulty of the game is that there are only four of them.

How many cards can you move at once in FreeCell?

It depends on your empty space, not on the length of the run. The count is (empty free cells + 1) multiplied by 2 for each empty column: five cards with four cells free and no empty column, six with two cells and one empty column, twenty with four cells and two empty columns. If the destination is the empty column, do not count it.

Underneath the arithmetic the rule is just that a group can move if you could have carried it one card at a time using the space you have. Some implementations make you do that manually; ours moves the whole run for you when the maths allows it. When a drag is refused, that is not always the end of it: the formula only counts empty space, so if a card already on the board happens to accept one of yours, you can still take the run across by hand, one card at a time.

Can you undo in FreeCell?

In our version, yes. The Undo button in the heads-up display steps back through your moves, up to 200 in one sitting, which is more than a typical deal takes. Reload the page and the last 50 come back with the board. Redo is on the keyboard: R, or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Z. Both do count as moves on the counter, and a win that used undo won’t earn the no-undo achievements — otherwise nothing is held against you.

Undo is not cheating in FreeCell, and it is worth being unembarrassed about it. Because the whole board is visible, undoing is how you test a line of play you were not sure about — which is exactly the skill the game is teaching.

What is the hardest FreeCell deal?

The famous one is not hard, it is impossible. Microsoft deal number 11982 is the single deal out of 32,000 that cannot be won at all, and no human or solver has ever finished it — which means it takes no skill to lose.

Among deals that can be won, difficulty is mostly about how early your Aces are buried and how many Kings are sitting on low cards. A deal with two Kings covering Aces will fight you far harder than one with an Ace on top of a column, even though both are solvable.

Now go and play a deal

The fastest way to get better at FreeCell is to play the same deal twice: once badly, then again knowing where it goes wrong. Hit Share before you leave a board and the link you get reopens that exact deal.

No sign-up, no download, and your game saves itself in your browser if you close the tab.

• Play FreeCell now
• Play deal 1978 from this guide
• More guides on the Solitarium blog