FreeCell is the solitaire where losing always means the same thing: you made a wrong move. Every one of the 52 cards is face up from the first second, there is no stock to draw from and no card you have not seen, and almost every deal can be won. That makes it less relaxing than Klondike and a lot more satisfying, because the game is entirely about reading a position, and reading positions is a skill you can actually get better at.
How does FreeCell work?
All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns, called cascades: four with seven cards and four with six. Above them sit four free cells, each of which can hold exactly one card, and four foundations, one per suit, which you fill from Ace up to King. Within the cascades you build downward in alternating colours, red on black and black on red. Any card can go into an empty free cell, and any card can start an empty cascade. Get all 52 cards onto the foundations and you win.
How to play FreeCell (step by step)
- Before touching anything, find the four Aces and the twos and note which cascades bury them.
- Pick the cascade you can empty or unblock in the fewest moves and start there.
- Move cards in alternating-colour descending runs, using the free cells only to park cards briefly.
- Send Aces and low cards home as they surface; leave higher cards in play while they might still be useful as parents.
- Empty a whole cascade as early as you can, then use that space to relocate long runs.
- Keep going until every card is home, or the game offers to finish the deal for you.
The supermove formula, and why it is the real rule of the game
Strictly, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. Moving a run of five cards means shuffling four of them into free cells and empty columns and back out again, and the game does that for you as a single drag, which is called a supermove. What it cannot do is move more cards than the spare space allows. The limit is: (empty free cells + 1) multiplied by 2 for every empty cascade. If you are moving the run into an empty cascade, that cascade does not count toward the doubling.
| Empty free cells | Empty cascades | Cards you can move |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 0 | 5 |
| 2 | 0 | 3 |
| 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 4 | 1 | 10 |
| 2 | 1 | 6 |
| 4 | 2 | 20 |
Read that table once and the strategy writes itself. An empty cascade doubles what you can move; a free cell adds one. Fill all four free cells and you are back to moving a single card, which is how most "stuck" positions happen. Our game works the limit out for every drag and refuses a move that exceeds it, so you will never move a run illegally, but you will still lose games by spending the space that would have made the move possible.
Read the deal before you move
The best FreeCell habit is the least glamorous: sit on your hands for twenty seconds. Where are the Aces? A deal with two Aces on the bottom of seven-card cascades is a different deal from one with an Ace on top. Which cascade is closest to empty, and what would emptying it expose? Which low cards are trapped under high ones? Plan the first handful of moves in your head, and especially plan where each card you park is going to go afterwards. A free cell you fill with no exit in mind is the move that ends games.
Free cells are a loan, not storage
Each occupied free cell lowers your move limit and costs you a place to park later. Treat them like a loan you have to repay quickly: put a card in only when you can see, on the table right now, where it comes back out. If you find yourself with three cells full and no plan, undo back to the point where you had two and think again. Keeping at least one cell open at all times is not a style choice, it is what makes the supermove arithmetic keep working in your favour.
Empty a cascade, then do not waste it
An empty column is worth more than any free cell, because it doubles your capacity instead of adding one, and it can take a whole run rather than a single card. So dig one out early, usually the shortest cascade with the fewest high cards, and then guard it. Do not drop a random card there to get it out of the way. Use it to move a long run, or to receive a King so a whole sequence can be built on it. Two empty cascades with the free cells clear gives you twenty cards of movement, and at that point most deals are just tidying up.
Do not rush cards home
It feels productive to send every available card to the foundations, and it is often a mistake. A black 5 on the foundation can no longer hold a red 4, and if that red 4 is sitting on top of the card you need next, you have just made it homeless. The rule is to send low cards home freely, and to keep a card in play while any card of the opposite colour and one rank lower might still need it. Our game moves only genuinely safe cards home on its own, and once the position cannot be lost, the Auto button (or the E key) finishes the deal in one cascade of cards.
Deal numbers, streaks and the one deal you cannot win
Every deal in our version has a number, so you can replay the exact same layout, or hand the number to a friend and settle who solves it in fewer moves. The game keeps your wins, your current streak, your best streak and your best move count in your browser. One thing to be clear about: our deal numbers are our own shuffles, not Microsoft's, so the famous Windows deal numbers do not carry over.
That famous list is worth knowing anyway. Of the 32,000 numbered deals in the original Windows FreeCell, exactly one, game #11982, has been proven unsolvable. Across all possible deals the winnable share is roughly 99.999 percent. So when you lose, it was the moves.
Where FreeCell comes from
FreeCell descends from Baker's Game, which Martin Gardner described in Scientific American in 1968. Paul Alfille changed the building rule from same suit to alternating colours, which made far more deals solvable, and programmed the result in 1978 on the University of Illinois's PLATO system while he was a medical student. Microsoft shipped it with Windows from 1995, which is where most of the world learned it.
Frequently asked questions
Is every FreeCell deal winnable?
Nearly. Around 99.999 percent of random deals can be solved, and of Microsoft's original 32,000 numbered deals only #11982 has no solution. Our deals are random shuffles with their own numbers, so you can retry any deal you lose.
How many cards can I move at once in FreeCell?
The limit is the number of empty free cells plus one, doubled for every empty cascade. With all four free cells open and no empty cascade that is five cards; with one empty cascade it becomes ten. If the run is going into an empty cascade, that cascade is not counted.
Is FreeCell harder than Klondike?
It is harder to lose by luck and easier to lose by mistake. Klondike hides cards and some deals cannot be won at all; FreeCell shows you everything and almost always has a solution, so the difficulty is entirely in the planning.
If you want the same thinking with a longer arc, the Spider Solitaire guide is the natural next step, and our comparison of the whole solitaire family explains how the variants differ. All of them live on the solitaire page, next to the rest of the casual games.
Play FreeCell free in your browser: numbered deals, supermoves, unlimited undo, auto-finish, keyboard or touch, no download. Find the Aces, empty a column, and remember that the cards were never hiding anything.