FreeCell
FreeCell is the thinking player's solitaire: every card is face-up from the start, so nothing is hidden and nothing is luck. Four open cells hold cards aside while you unstack the tableau, and almost every deal ever dealt can be won if you plan the sequence far enough ahead. That makes a lost game genuinely your fault — which is exactly why people keep coming back to it.
- Players
- 1
- Playing time
- 15 min
- Ages
- 10 to adult
- Face down
- None
How it's played
Every card is face up before you touch anything. FreeCell is not a game about what you cannot see — it is a game about what you cannot reach.
cards face down. The entire deck is dealt into eight columns in the open, so there is nothing to turn over and nothing to find out.
Four columns of seven and four of six — the deck goes round the eight columns one card at a time until it runs out. There is no stock, no waste and no deal after this one. Everything you will ever get is already on the table.
Three kinds of place, and only one of them is generous
The columns
Build down in alternating colors — a red six onto a black seven. Everything is face up, so the only question is ever whether you can get at it.
The free cells
A parking space for exactly one card. Anything goes in; getting it out again is your problem, and a full cell is a cell that has stopped helping.
The foundations
Up from the ace, one suit each. Fill all four and you have won. A card can come back off a foundation if you need it, at a price.
An empty column takes any card at all
Not a king. This is where FreeCell parts company with the solitaire you already know: an empty column is the most valuable thing on the board precisely because anything can go into it — and, as the next section shows, because it is worth more than a free cell is.
How many cards you can move at once
You only ever really move one card. Moving a run of them is the game shuttling cards through your empty spaces for you — so the size of the run you can shift is decided, exactly, by how many empty spaces you have.
(1 + empty cells)×2empty columns
Cards you can move in one go
| Free cells empty | 0 empty columns | 1 empty column | 2 empty columns | 3 empty columns |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 5 | 10 | 20 | 40 |
| 3 | 4 | 8 | 16 | 32 |
| 2 | 3 | 6 | 12 | 24 |
| 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 16 |
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 |
All four cells full and no empty column: one card. That is the bottom-left of the table and it is where a lost game actually happens — not in a bad card, but in a board with nowhere left to put anything.
An empty column doubles; a free cell only adds. Emptying a column is worth more than emptying a cell, every time, which is why good play looks like clearing one column early rather than parking cards.
One catch worth knowing: the column you are moving into does not count toward its own multiplier. Moving into an empty column is not the same as moving past one.
Nothing left to blame
There is no stock to turn, no redeal and no card you have not seen. Every game you lose, you lost in the open — which is either the best or the worst thing about FreeCell, depending on the day.
All four foundations home
And you will not have to play it out by hand: once every column is in descending order, nothing can block anything, and the game finishes itself.
Cells full, nothing legal
There is no stock to turn and no deal to fall back on. FreeCell will not announce it either — you work out that you are dead by running out of things to try.
Undo goes all the way
Which is the only reason being stuck is survivable. Walk it back to the move that cost you and take the other branch.
There is a score, and it is a short one
- Sending a card to a foundation
- +10
- Pulling one back off again
- −10
It never goes below zero, and that is the whole tariff — no bonus for speed and no penalty for undoing. FreeCell's real scoreboard is whether the last card went home.
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