FreeCell

How to play

1. Tap a column — the legal spots light up: You land on a game that is already dealt: four free cells top left, four foundations top right, eight columns of face-up cards below. Tap any column and it lifts into a zoomed panel with the longest movable run already picked up, while every legal destination glows — amber for a foundation, lime for a column, cyan for a free cell.
2. Tap a glowing spot to move there: No precision dragging: the second tap makes the move. Columns build down in alternating colours, one rank at a time, so a red seven goes on a black eight. Each free cell parks a single card. To pick a different starting card, tap it inside the zoomed column; tap empty space to cancel.
3. Send every suit up from ace to king: The four foundations take one suit each, ace first, one rank at a time — all 52 cards home and you have won. The bar up top always reads cards home, moves played and free cells left, and the four progress rings around the foundations are the progress bar. Undo is unlimited and costs you nothing, so a dead end just means backing up a few moves.

Rules & variants

The full rules of FreeCell: a standard 52-card deck, no jokers, is dealt face up into eight columns — seven cards in the first four, six in the rest. There is no stock, no waste pile and nothing hidden, so every piece of information you will ever get is on screen from the first second. Four free cells on the left hold one card each; four foundations on the right take one suit each. Build all four suits from ace to king and the game is won.

Building on the columns follows colour, not suit: cards go down one rank at a time in alternating colours, so a red seven lands on a black eight or a black club eight but never on a red diamond eight. An empty column will take any card or any legal run, which is exactly why an empty column is worth so much more than an empty cell. Foundations work the other way round — same suit, strictly ascending from the ace, no skipping and no mixing.

How many cards you can move at once — the rule that trips up almost everybody: cards really move one at a time, and a run that appears to slide across as a block is being shuttled through your free cells and empty columns. The number you can carry is (empty free cells + 1) x 2^(empty columns). Three cells and no empty column is four cards; three cells and one empty column is eight; two cells and no empty column is only three. One catch people miss: if the destination is itself an empty column, that column cannot double as a staging area, so the exponent drops by one — with two cells and one empty column you can carry six onto an ordinary column but only three into the empty one. This site does the arithmetic for you and shows both numbers the moment you pick a run up.

What free cells are actually for: a free cell is carrying capacity, not a rubbish bin. Every cell you occupy is one fewer card you can move in a single go, and filling all four is how players talk themselves into a position that genuinely cannot move. Strong play keeps cells empty and only spends one when there is a clear plan to take the card back out. An empty column is stronger still — cells add to your capacity, empty columns multiply it — so clearing your shortest column early is usually worth more than rushing two cards onto a foundation.

Cards do not come back off a foundation. This is worth stating because implementations disagree and it can otherwise look like a bug. We forbid it because undo is unlimited and already covers 'I sent that up too early', and because allowing take-backs would break both the proof behind the one-tap finish and the test behind safe auto-collect.

FreeCell strategy that actually raises your win rate: first, empty columns beat empty cells — cells are addition, columns are multiplication, so clearing your shortest column doubles what you can carry. Second, do not rush cards onto the foundations; a low card still on the table is a landing pad for the opposite colour, and sending it up early is how a game jams. That is also why safe auto-collect is off by default here. Third, before your tenth move, find where the aces and twos are buried and make digging them out the plan. Fourth, never occupy a cell without knowing when the card comes back out. And undo is part of the game, not cheating — every card is face up, so undo only saves you arithmetic.

Are all FreeCell deals winnable? Almost all of them are; unsolvable deals are vanishingly rare. This site only deals games that were proved solvable offline — a solver played every deal number through during development, and only the ones it actually finished are in the pool. So a loss means the deal was hard, not impossible. Solvable is not the same as easy, though: two solvable deals can be worlds apart, which is why they are split into gentle, standard and tough tiers by how hard the solver had to work. The fully random tier skips the check entirely if you want the real odds.

Stuck with nothing to move: undo is unlimited, costs nothing and never touches your record. When a position truly has no legal move anywhere — no column, no cell, no foundation — the game says so plainly and offers three ways out: take a move back, restart the same deal, or deal a new one. It never tells you that you lost. If moves still exist but the game feels hopeless, that is a soft dead end, and nobody can judge those reliably, so we make no claim about them. Back up a few moves and take another line.

Restarting a deal and dealing a new one are different things, and this site keeps them physically apart. Restart puts the same deal number back the way it started, for when you want to try another route. Dealing a new game gives you a fresh number. Restart lives in the settings drawer with the current number next to it; deal a new game only appears on the win screen and the no-moves panel. The win screen also offers a replay of the same deal and shows what you scored last time, so you have something to beat.

Deal numbers and saved progress: every game is decided by a single deal number, so the same number always deals exactly the same cards and you can hand it to somebody else to play the identical game. The board saves itself after every move, undo history included — take a call, close the tab, come back and you are on the same move, with no dialogue asking whether you want to continue. Records are kept per difficulty tier and stay on this device; there is no account and no leaderboard.

A worked example of moving a run: say two cells are empty and no column is, and you want to carry a black eight, red seven and black six onto a red nine. Capacity is (2 + 1) x 2^0 = 3, which is exactly enough. What actually happens is five single-card moves: the six into a cell, the seven into a cell, the eight onto the nine, the seven back down, the six back down. You watch the cards go out to the cells and come back, which is the clearest possible explanation of why capacity depends on empty cells. The whole thing still counts as one move, and one undo puts it all back.

How FreeCell differs from the other solitaires: Klondike hides cards face down and hands you a stock pile, so luck plays a large part; Spider wants same-suit sequences and thirteen-card runs. FreeCell shows you all 52 cards with nothing concealed, which makes it the most purely logical member of the family — you lose to your own planning, not to the deal. There is also a close cousin called Baker's Game where columns must be built in the same suit rather than alternating colours; that is a different game and not what this page deals.

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