FreeCell Solitaire

Nothing hidden at all

How to play FreeCell Solitaire

All 52 cards are dealt into eight columns, face up: four columns of seven and four of six. Above them sit four empty cells and four empty foundations. That is the entire game — there is no stock, no waste, no reserve and nothing to turn over.

Columns build down in alternating colours, exactly as in Klondike. Foundations build up by suit from ace to king. A free cell holds one card, any card, and you can take it back out whenever it has somewhere legal to go. An empty column will take anything at all.

What makes FreeCell a different game from every other tableau builder is what it withholds: luck. You can see everything from the first move. If the deal is lost, it was lost by a decision you made, and you can usually point at which one.

Cells and columns

What the free cells make possible

The rule that is the game

How many cards you can move at once

Strictly, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. Dragging a run of five is shorthand for parking four cards somewhere and putting them back — so the number you can move depends entirely on how much empty space you have.

The rule this page uses is the standard one: (free cells + 1) × 2 to the power of empty columns. Free cells add to the total. Empty columns double it. That asymmetry is the single most important thing to understand about FreeCell, and it is why experienced players will burn several moves to open a column they do not immediately need.

Measured on this page's game

How many free cells do you really need?

We dealt 10,000 random games and gave each one to a solver four times: with four free cells, then three, two and one. Nothing in FreeCell is hidden, so the solver plays exactly the game you do, and its result is what each deal allows.

With the standard four cells, every one our solver finished was winnable; it gave up on 92 of 10,000 before finding the line. The best published figure, from far larger runs, is that 99.9989% of deals can be won. On the published figures, taking one cell away changes almost nothing (99.4%), a second makes about one deal in five impossible (79.5%), and with a single cell only about one in five can be won at all (19.3%). Each cell you lose costs more than the last.

The catch is that the solver plans: its winning lines run to about 109 moves, all worked out before the first one is played.

How many can move

FreeCell strategy

Because nothing is hidden, FreeCell rewards looking before moving more than any other game here. The strongest habit is to find the aces first and count what sits on top of them. Those cards are your real objective; everything else is scaffolding to get at them.

Treat the cells as a workspace rather than storage. A card in a cell costs you capacity for as long as it stays there, so before parking anything, know how it comes back out. If the answer is "when a red 7 turns up", and both red 7s are buried at the bottom of long columns, that cell is gone for the rest of the game.

Be slower with foundations than instinct suggests. Sending a card up is irreversible on this page, and a 5 that looked spare is exactly what the tableau needs to unload a 4 three moves later. Aces and twos always go; past that, ask whether the tableau still wants it.

Finally, when a position looks stuck, count your capacity before concluding it is. Players give up on deals that a single well-chosen cell-emptying move would have opened, because they were thinking in cards rather than in the capacity formula.

The Hint button asks the same solver for a winning line from your current position and shows its next move. If you have already made the deal impossible, it tells you, so you know to undo rather than keep searching.

Three ways to waste a cell

Where FreeCell deals are actually lost

These are not the reverse of the advice above. Each is a position that looks fine when you create it and is unrecoverable two dozen moves later.

Filling all four cells early

A card in a cell is not stored, it is stranded — it can only leave onto a foundation or onto a legal tableau card. Four full cells means capacity one, which means you can move exactly one card at a time, which usually means the deal is over.

Filling an empty column to tidy up

An empty column is worth more than any card you could put in it. Dropping a lone queen into a space to clear a cell trades your most valuable asset for your second-cheapest.

Burying an ace under a long tidy run

Because everything is visible it is easy to build an elegant descending run on top of the exact ace you needed. Nothing is hidden, so this one is always avoidable — check what is underneath before you build.

Where deals are really lost

FreeCell against its nearest relatives

Two games on this site share FreeCell's open information and change one rule each. Both are harder, and comparing them shows how much of FreeCell's fairness comes from the space rule rather than the visibility.

Eight Off gives you twice as many cells and takes away the free use of spaces, and it is noticeably harder — more evidence for the doubling rule above. If you want the same open information with a genuinely punishing ruleset, Seahaven Towers packs by suit rather than by colour, which removes most of the moves you are used to having.