FreeCell

How to play FreeCell

FreeCell is a solitaire game where every card is dealt face up, so there is no luck of the draw: every deal is a puzzle you can see from the start. The goal is to move all 52 cards onto the four foundations at the top right, one pile per suit, built up from Ace to King.

• Columns: the eight columns at the bottom. Build downward in alternating colors, for example a red 7 on a black 8.
• Free cells: the four spaces at the top left. Each holds one card of any kind. They are your working room, and filling them up is the fastest way to get stuck.
• Empty columns: any card, or any ordered stack, can go into an empty column. An empty column is worth more than a free cell because it can hold a whole run.
• Moving stacks: you can move a correctly built stack in one go if you could have moved it one card at a time through your free space. The limit is one more than your empty free cells, doubled for every empty column (not counting the column you are moving into).

Controls

• Computer: click a card or stack to send it to the best legal spot: a foundation if it fits, then a column, then an empty column, then a free cell. To choose the spot yourself, drag it. Ctrl/Cmd + Z undoes.
• Phone or tablet: tap to move a card automatically, or drag it with your finger.

Cards that can safely go home fly to the foundations on their own. A card is only sent up automatically when no card still in play could need it as a landing spot, so autoplay never takes away a card you could still use.

Helpful features

• Numbered deals. Every game has a number, and it uses the same shuffle as the FreeCell that came with older versions of Windows. Click Game # to play any deal from 1 to 1,000,000, including the famous #11982. You can also link straight to a deal, for example poozee.com/games/freecell?deal=617.
• Always winnable by default. New games are picked from the 32,000 classic deals, skipping #11982, the one deal in that set that cannot be won.
• Smart hints. Press Hint and a solver searches for a winning line from your current position, then lights up the next move. If it cannot find a win from where you are, it tells you, which usually means it is time to undo.
• Undo and Restart. Take back as many moves as you like, or start the same deal over.
• One-tap finish. When every column runs downhill and nothing is blocked, press Finish and the cards fly home.
• Auto-save and best time. Your game is saved on this device, along with your fastest win.

Quick strategy

1. Play Aces and 2s home early and look for moves that free them. Autoplay handles most of this for you.
2. Keep free cells empty. Treat each one as a loan you will have to pay back. Before you put a card in a cell, know how you will get it out.
3. Empty a column when you can. An empty column doubles how many cards you can move at once.
4. Work on the column that frees the most useful card, usually one hiding a low card.
5. Think before breaking a long run. Once a built run is split, you may not have the room to rebuild it.

Our full guide to how to play FreeCell walks through the rules, the stack-moving limit with a table, and a step-by-step way to plan your opening.

Pro tip: Before your first move, find all four Aces. The deeper an Ace is buried, the sooner you should start digging for it.

Where FreeCell came from

FreeCell grew out of older solitaire games that give you a few spare spaces to hold cards. Paul Alfille took one of them, Baker's Game, and changed a single rule: cards build down in alternating colors instead of by suit. That change makes nearly every deal winnable. He wrote the first version for the PLATO educational computer system in 1978. Jim Horne later wrote the version for Windows, which first appeared in 1992 in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 and later shipped with Windows 95. Its 32,000 numbered deals inspired the Internet FreeCell Project, where volunteers set out to solve every one. By April 1995 they had solved them all except one: deal #11982, which is still considered impossible.