How to play FreeCell

FreeCell is a single-player solitaire game played with one standard 52-card deck. Unlike most solitaire games, every card is dealt face-up and there is no hidden stock pile — so you can see the entire game from the start. That one difference is why FreeCell is a puzzle rather than a gamble: the information is all there, and winning is a matter of finding the order, not drawing the right card.

What is FreeCell?

The name comes from the four free cells in the top-left corner of the board — four spaces that each hold a single card. They are your working memory: somewhere to park a card while you untangle the column beneath it. The whole game is a negotiation between those four cells, the eight columns of the tableau, and the four foundations you are trying to fill.

The layout

There are three areas on a FreeCell board:

• Eight tableau columns across the bottom, holding all 52 cards. The first four columns get seven cards, the last four get six. Everything is face-up.
• Four free cells, top-left. Each holds exactly one card of any suit or rank.
• Four foundations, top-right — one per suit. These start empty and are built up from Ace to King. Filling all four is how you win.

The rules

Three kinds of move, and one goal.

1. Build the tableau down in alternating colours. You may place a card on the bottom of a column if it is one rank lower and the opposite colour: a red 6 onto a black 7, a black 9 onto a red 10. Any card can be moved to an empty column.
2. Park a card in a free cell. Move any single card to an open free cell, and move it back out to a legal tableau spot or a foundation whenever you like. A full cell is dead weight until you clear it.
3. Build the foundations up by suit. Send each Ace up as it becomes free, then the 2 of that suit, the 3, and so on to the King. Cards on the foundations are usually out of play for good.

You win when all 52 cards sit on the foundations, each suit complete from Ace to King. There is no shuffle, no redeal and no draw — if you get stuck, it is the sequence of moves that failed, not the luck of the cards.

Moving stacks: the one formula to remember

Strictly, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. But every good implementation lets you drag an ordered run — say black 8, red 7, black 6 — in a single gesture, because it could be done one card at a time using the empty cells and columns. The number of cards you can shift this way is not unlimited:

With all four cells free and no empty columns you can move five cards; open one column and it jumps to ten; open two and it is twenty. Moving a run into an empty column halves the figure (that column can no longer be a multiplier). This single rule explains most of why a position is or is not winnable, so it is worth internalising before anything else.

A winning strategy

FreeCell is solvable from almost any deal, but only if you play with a plan. The habits that matter most:

• Free the Aces and twos first. They are the foundation's foundation. A low card buried deep in a column is the thing most likely to lose you the game, so dig for it early while you still have room.
• Guard your free cells. Each filled cell cuts your mobility — and your move-count — sharply. Try never to fill the last one; a position with zero free cells and no empty column is usually lost.
• An empty column is gold. It holds a whole run and doubles how many cards you can move. Opening one is often worth emptying two cells to do, as long as you can refill it quickly.
• Don't rush cards to the foundations. A card on a foundation can't come back to help you tidy the tableau. Keep a 5 or 6 in play if it still has work to do holding a run together.
• Plan backwards from the blockers. Find the lowest card you cannot yet play, work out what is sitting on top of it, and make a path for those cards before you commit your cells elsewhere.

Are all FreeCell games winnable?

Very nearly. Microsoft shipped 32,000 numbered deals with Windows FreeCell, and a community project eventually confirmed that every one of them is solvable except game #11982 — the single famous unwinnable deal. Across all possible shuffles the solvable fraction is about 99.999%. In practice that means if you lose, you can almost always assume the deal was winnable and that a different line would have cracked it — which is exactly what keeps good players coming back.

FreeCell vs Klondike solitaire

“Solitaire” on most computers means Klondike — the one with a face-down stock you draw from. The differences are what give FreeCell its reputation:

• Information. Klondike hides most of the deck; FreeCell shows all of it. You never have to guess.
• Luck. Klondike deals are often simply unwinnable no matter how you play. FreeCell deals almost always have a solution.
• Skill. Because nothing is hidden, FreeCell is closer to a logic puzzle. Your win rate reflects how well you plan, not how the stock fell.

Variants worth knowing

• Baker's Game. The ancestor of FreeCell — identical, except the tableau is built down in the same suit rather than alternating colours. Harder, and fewer deals are solvable.
• Eight Off. Eight free cells but tableau building in-suit, and columns start with cells pre-filled. A gentler cousin.
• Two-deck FreeCell. 104 cards, six free cells, ten columns, eight foundations — the same ideas at twice the length.

A short history

The modern game was written by Paul Alfille in 1978 on the PLATO system, building on an older solitaire called Baker's Game. It reached a vast audience in 1995 when Microsoft bundled FreeCell with Windows — originally to quietly test the operating system's 32-bit networking stack — and a generation learned the game from that little window of 32,000 numbered deals.