How to play FreeCell
All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns: the four on the left get seven cards and the four on the right get six. At the top left are four free cells, each able to hold one card for a while. At the top right are four foundations.
- Only the top card of a column or a card in a free cell can move.
- In the columns, build down in alternating colors: a card goes on one that is one rank higher and of the other color.
- Any card can go into an empty column.
- Build each foundation up by suit from Ace to King. Move all 52 cards there to win.
Moving several cards at once
Strictly, cards move one at a time, but the game does the shuffling through free cells and empty columns for you. The most cards you can move as a unit is the number of empty free cells plus one, doubled for each empty column. With two empty cells and one empty column that is (2 + 1) × 2 = 6 cards. When the target is itself an empty column it does not count, so the limit is halved.
Tips
- Study the deal first: every card is visible, so find where the Aces and 2s are buried.
- Keep free cells free: full cells also block multi-card moves. Park only cards you can bring back soon.
- An empty column is worth more than a free cell, because it doubles how many cards you can move.
- Dig out low cards early: clearing the columns that cover Aces and 2s gets the foundations moving.
Is almost every deal really solvable?
Yes. FreeCell is known for how rarely a deal is impossible. In a 2018 computer study of 8.6 billion deals by Shlomi Fish and Theodore Pringle, about one deal in 84,000 had no solution. Comma Puzzles shuffles at random, so a rare impossible deal can still appear, but if you are stuck there is usually another way. Try Undo.
A short history
FreeCell was a computer game from the start. Paul Alfille, then a medical student at the University of Illinois, wrote it in 1978 for the PLATO educational computer system. He based it on Baker's Game, which Martin Gardner described in Scientific American in 1968, and changed the building rule from same suit to alternating colors, which makes far more deals solvable. It became widely known after it was bundled with a PC operating system in the mid-1990s.