FreeCell Solitaire is the thinking person's solitaire game — every card is face-up from the first move, nothing is hidden, and almost every deal can be beaten if you plan well enough. Four free cells act as temporary parking spots for individual cards, which is the single mechanic that separates FreeCell from most other solitaire variants and makes it closer to a logic puzzle than a card game. Paul Alfille created FreeCell in 1978 on the PLATO computer system; Jim Horne's 1991 port to Windows turned it into one of the most-played computer games in history.
What is FreeCell Solitaire?
FreeCell Solitaire is a single-player card game played with a standard 52-card deck. The entire deck is dealt face-up across eight tableau columns at the start — no hidden cards, ever. Four empty free cells in the upper-left can each hold one card at a time, acting as a short-term buffer for cards you need to move out of the way. Four foundation piles in the upper-right collect each suit from Ace up to King; filling all four foundations wins the game.
The free cells are the game's defining feature. Every card being visible from move one means the only thing standing between you and a win is planning. You know where every card is. You have four cells to maneuver around blockages. With careful enough sequencing, almost every deal resolves — which makes a failed game feel more like a calculation error than bad luck.
Out of 32,000 numbered deals studied by the FreeCell Project (organized by Dave Ring and others), only 8 are provably unsolvable: deals #11982, #146692, #186216, #455889, #495505, #512118, #517776, and #781948. That means over 99.999% of FreeCell deals are winnable with perfect play. No other mainstream solitaire variant comes close to that ratio.
How to play FreeCell Solitaire
Step 1 — Deal the board
All 52 cards are dealt face-up into eight tableau columns. The first four columns (columns 0-3) receive 7 cards each; the last four columns (columns 4-7) receive 6 cards each. The four free cells in the upper-left and four foundation slots in the upper-right start empty.
Step 2 — Build the tableau down by alternating colors
In the tableau you build sequences downward by alternating color — a black 7 on a red 8, a red 4 on a black 5. You can move a single card this way freely. Moving multiple cards as a group is governed by the supermove rule.
Step 3 — Use free cells as buffers
A free cell holds exactly one card. Park a blocking card in a free cell to uncover the card you actually need. The key discipline: treat free cells like a scarce resource. Filling all four cells simultaneously removes your ability to maneuver and frequently leads to a dead end.
Step 4 — Apply the supermove rule when moving groups
You can move a group of N cards in a single action only if (freeCells + 1) × 2^(emptyCols) is at least N, where freeCells is the number of unoccupied free cells and emptyCols is the number of empty tableau columns. This formula governs how many cards can effectively leapfrog in a single move — it's the arithmetic backbone of every deep FreeCell plan.
Step 5 — Build foundations up by suit from Ace to King
Each foundation pile accepts one suit only, starting with the Ace and building in order up to King. Send Aces to their foundation the moment they're accessible. After that, think before sending a card up — a card on the foundation is no longer available to receive tableau moves.
Step 6 — Win the game
All 52 cards on their four foundation piles, Ace through King by suit. In FreeCell, unlike Klondike, most games that look salvageable actually are — if you hit a dead end, the problem is almost always a move made 5 or 10 steps earlier, not an unwinnable deal.
The FreeCell play area
The FreeCell board is laid out across a single screen with no stock or waste pile. The eight tableau columns fill the lower two-thirds of the screen, all cards face-up. Along the top, from left to right, sit the four free cells (marked with small empty slots) and then the four foundation piles (marked with suit icons).
Because every card is visible from move one, there is no need to flip cards. The visual challenge is tracking which chains of alternating-color sequences can be assembled given the current free-cell count and empty-column count. Most online FreeCell implementations — including Mr. Solitaire — show the legal moves via a highlight on click and optionally display the current supermove limit in a corner of the screen. Move count and elapsed time appear in the info bar.
A significant difference from Klondike: there is no autocomplete in FreeCell the way there is in Klondike. In Klondike, once all cards are face-up and in order, the game can resolve itself automatically. In FreeCell, the final phase still requires deliberate moves to shuttle cards through free cells and onto the foundations in the right order.
Available moves
FreeCell's move set is small but the interactions between moves create most of the game's depth.
Move from tableau to tableau. A single card, or a legally sized group under the supermove rule, moving from the bottom of one column to the bottom of another. The destination card must be exactly one rank higher and the opposite color from the card being placed.
Move from tableau to free cell. A single card from the bottom of any tableau column parks in any empty free cell. This opens the card below it in the source column.
Move from free cell to tableau. A card sitting in a free cell can move to the bottom of any tableau column where it fits the alternating-color descending sequence. Clearing free cells this way is one of the most important recurring sub-goals.
Move from tableau or free cell to foundation. Any Ace goes directly to its empty foundation. Any subsequent card goes to the foundation for its suit if it is exactly one rank above the current top card. Unlike Klondike, in FreeCell you can also move cards from a free cell directly to a foundation.
Move a card to an empty tableau column. Any card — any rank, any suit — can move to an empty column. Empty columns are extremely powerful because they each contribute 2× to the supermove multiplier.
FreeCell Solitaire strategy
Never fill all four free cells at once
With all four free cells occupied, your supermove limit collapses to exactly one card per move, and you lose the ability to reorder anything. One or two occupied free cells is fine. Three starts to feel tight. Four is almost always a mistake. If you catch yourself about to fill the last free cell, stop and retrace your last few moves — there is usually a cleaner path that doesn't require all four.
Move Aces and 2s to the foundation immediately
Aces serve no purpose in a FreeCell tableau — nothing goes on top of an Ace, and keeping one in a column or a free cell wastes space. The same applies to a 2 once its Ace is already on the foundation. Send both instantly. Unlike cards of higher rank, there is no scenario where holding an Ace or 2 in the tableau is strategically better than sending it up.
Plan 5 to 10 moves ahead
Since all cards are visible, FreeCell rewards players who think further ahead than Klondike does. Before you make a move, ask: what does the card I'm about to move actually accomplish? If the answer is "it frees up a card I need in three moves," that's a good reason. If the answer is "it puts a sequence together that looks tidy," pause and check whether tidiness actually advances the game or just delays a problem.
Build columns in suit, not just alternating color
The tableau rule only requires alternating color for legal placement. But when you build in the same suit — say, a run of 9-8-7-6 all in hearts — that run can move as a group using fewer free cells than a mixed-color run of the same length. Where you have a choice between building in-suit and building across suits, prefer in-suit. The payoff comes several moves later when you need to relocate that column.
Preserve empty columns as long as possible
An empty column doubles the number of cards you can move as a group (the supermove formula multiplies by 2 for each empty column). Once you park a card in an empty column, you lose that multiplier until the column empties again. Think of empty columns the way FreeCell thinks of them: not as storage, but as machinery that makes every other move cheaper.
Work on the longest buried sequences first
Look at the foundation target for each suit and trace backward through the tableau to find where the next needed card is buried. Start excavating the suit whose next card is deepest — freeing it early gives you the most time to route other moves around it. Suits where the next card is near the surface can wait; the buried ones set the real constraint.
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FreeCell difficulty and close variants
Standard FreeCell with four free cells is the dominant variant, but the number of free cells is actually a dial that changes the game's difficulty significantly. Eight Off is a close relative with eight free cells instead of four, making it considerably easier. Seahorse Solitaire and other variants reduce free cells to two or three, sharply limiting maneuverability. The numbered-deal community largely focuses on four-cell FreeCell because Alfille's original design set that count.
Within standard FreeCell, the difficulty of individual deals varies a lot. Some deals resolve almost mechanically once you see the Aces are accessible; others require long look-ahead chains to avoid filling all four free cells before you've set up the foundation runs. The 8 provably unsolvable deals are all unusually deep traps — the blocking structures that make them unwinnable are subtle enough that human players often don't spot them until many moves in.
If you're building toward the hardest FreeCell games, start with deals where the Aces are buried in the middle of long columns. Those deals demand the most precise sequencing and give free cells the least room to breathe. As a rough rule: if you can get all four Aces to the foundation within your first 15 moves, the deal is accessible. If the Aces are still partly buried after 15 moves, expect a difficult middle game.
Odds of winning FreeCell Solitaire
FreeCell is the most solvable mainstream solitaire variant by a large margin. The FreeCell Project, organized by Dave Ring and involving contributions from dozens of solvers, worked through 32,000 numbered deals and found that only 8 of them are provably unsolvable: deal numbers #11982, #146692, #186216, #455889, #495505, #512118, #517776, and #781948. The rest — over 99.999% — can be beaten with perfect play.
That figure applies to "perfect play," which in practice means planning several moves ahead and keeping free cells clear. Casual players who haven't internalized the supermove rule and who fill all four free cells routinely will lose games that are mathematically winnable. The skill gap in FreeCell is real: a first-time player might win 20-30% of games; a player who has internalized the core rules can approach 95%+.
The 8 unsolvable deals are well-documented and Mr. Solitaire's deal generator either avoids them entirely or flags them before you start. If you're playing on a numbered deal system and find yourself unable to win despite every angle you've tried, check whether the deal number is one of the known 8 before concluding you've made an error.
Unlike Klondike, a FreeCell loss is almost always recoverable with the undo button. When you reach a dead end, go back to the branch point — usually the moment you filled the last free cell or committed a card to an empty column too early — and try a different sequence. The information was always there; the plan just needs revision.
History of FreeCell Solitaire
FreeCell was invented in 1978 by Paul Alfille, a medical student at the University of Illinois, while working on the PLATO educational computer system. Alfille wrote the first computerized version of the game and chose the format specifically because — unlike Klondike — every card was always visible, making the game straightforward to implement and verify computationally. He recognized immediately that the face-up format made almost every deal solvable, which was a deliberate design goal.
The game stayed relatively obscure until 1991, when Jim Horne, an engineer at Microsoft, ported FreeCell to Windows as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. Horne added the numbered deal system — a specific deal number maps to a specific shuffled deck — which let players share and compare specific games. The numbered deals became a community fixture; players posted solutions online for hard deals, and the impossible deals became minor internet legends.
Microsoft later bundled FreeCell directly with Windows 95 and subsequent versions, cementing its place alongside Klondike and Minesweeper as one of the three canonical Windows time-wasters of the 1990s. It is included in Microsoft Solitaire Collection today, available across Windows, iOS, and Android.
FreeCell also became a subject of serious computer science study. The game's full information (all cards visible) made it tractable for search algorithms, and the question of which deals were unsolvable attracted attention from puzzle enthusiasts and researchers alike. The result of that work — eight specific unsolvable deals out of 32,000, and by extension essentially zero out of the full 52-factorial possible deck orderings — is one of the more precisely characterized results in recreational mathematics.
Frequently asked questions
What is FreeCell Solitaire?
- FreeCell Solitaire is a single-player card game played with one standard 52-card deck. All cards are dealt face-up across eight tableau columns. Four free cells let you temporarily park individual cards, and four foundation piles collect each suit from Ace to King. The goal is to move all 52 cards to the foundations.
How many free cells are there in FreeCell?
- Four. Each free cell holds exactly one card at a time. The number of occupied versus empty free cells directly controls how many cards you can move in a single group action, so managing them carefully is the central skill of the game.
Are all FreeCell games winnable?
- Almost. Out of 32,000 deals studied by the FreeCell Project (organized by Dave Ring), only 8 are provably unsolvable: #11982, #146692, #186216, #455889, #495505, #512118, #517776, and #781948. All other deals — over 99.999% — can be won with perfect play. FreeCell is essentially a pure skill game.
What is the supermove rule in FreeCell?
- The supermove rule defines how many cards you can relocate in a single action. The formula is: (freeCells + 1) × 2^(emptyCols), where freeCells is the count of unoccupied free cells and emptyCols is the count of empty tableau columns. With all four free cells empty and one empty column, you can move up to (4+1)×2 = 10 cards as a group.
Who invented FreeCell?
- Paul Alfille created FreeCell in 1978 on the PLATO computer system while at the University of Illinois. He designed it so that all cards would be face-up, making the game fully transparent. Jim Horne ported it to Windows at Microsoft in 1991, adding the numbered deal system that let players share and revisit specific shuffles.
What is the difference between FreeCell and Klondike?
- The two biggest differences are information and luck. In Klondike, most cards start face-down — hidden information means luck matters. In FreeCell, every card is visible from the start. Klondike has a stock pile you draw from; FreeCell has no stock. FreeCell has four free cells that Klondike lacks. The result: FreeCell is closer to a logic puzzle, Klondike is a probabilistic game with skill on top.
What is a good FreeCell strategy?
- The most important habits are: never fill all four free cells at once (it collapses your move options), send Aces and 2s to the foundation immediately, preserve empty columns as long as possible (each one doubles your group-move capacity), and build tableau runs in the same suit where you have a choice. Planning 5 to 10 moves ahead separates strong FreeCell players from average ones.
Can I move cards back from the foundation to the tableau in FreeCell?
- Yes. A card on the foundation can move back to the tableau if it fits an alternating-color descending sequence. This is occasionally necessary to unlock a buried card. Use it sparingly — it delays your win condition and can create new blockages.
Why does FreeCell sometimes show a deal number?
- The numbered deal system was introduced by Jim Horne in the 1991 Windows port. A deal number maps to a specific shuffled arrangement of the deck, so two players entering the same number get the same game. It lets players share difficult deals, compare solutions, and verify whether a particular layout is one of the known 8 unsolvable games.
How is FreeCell scored on Mr. Solitaire?
- Mr. Solitaire tracks moves, elapsed time, and a composite score on every FreeCell game. Lower move counts and faster times yield better scores. Sign in with a Google account to save stats across devices. Guest play is unlimited and free — no account required unless you want leaderboard access and cross-device stat sync.
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