FreeCell — free solitaire where the whole deal is face up

FreeCell is the solitaire with almost no luck left in it. All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns, so from the first second you can see every card you will ever have to deal with — the game is a puzzle, not a gamble. Four free cells hold one card each as temporary parking, and four foundations take each suit from Ace up to King. Get all 52 cards home and you have won.

Practically every FreeCell deal is winnable. Of the 32,000 numbered deals that shipped with Windows, exactly one — number 11982 — has ever been proven impossible. This version goes further and proves it for you: before a board appears, the page runs a solver over the shuffle and only deals it once it has found a winning line, so a game you lose is a game you misplayed. Tap to move, undo as much as you like, and the clock is your score.

How to play

• Tap a card to pick it up, then tap where it should go. No dragging. Tap it again to put it back down. Tap another card further up the same column to widen the pickup into a supermove.
• On the columns, cards stack descending in alternating colours — a red 7 goes on a black 8. Any single card fits an empty free cell, and an empty column takes any card at all.
• Supermove: pick up a card with an ordered run beneath it and the whole run travels together, up to (1 + free cells) × 2^{empty columns} cards — the destination doesn't count if it is itself the empty column.
• A card that can never be needed again flies home on its own, so you never hand-feed aces. And a single tap sends a card straight to its foundation when it fits there and has no card in the columns left to sit on — the tap could not have meant anything else.
• ↩ Undo is unlimited, and ✨ AUTO appears the moment the board can finish itself.
• Keyboard: 1–8 tap a column (press the same key again to take more of the run), Q W E R the free cells, Enter sends the selected card home, Z undoes, Esc puts the card back.

How to actually win at FreeCell

• An empty column beats a free cell — by a lot. Look at the supermove formula: each free cell adds one to how many cards you can shift, but each empty column doubles it. With four cells and no empty columns you can move 5 cards; free up a single column and it becomes 10. Emptying the shortest column early is very often the strongest move available, even when it looks like it accomplishes nothing.
• Decide how a card leaves a cell before you put it there. A parked card has exactly two exits: its foundation, or a card of the opposite colour one rank higher. If that card is buried under six others, the cell is gone for the rest of the game. Losing FreeCell almost always looks the same — all four cells full, nowhere to unload them, and no legal move left.
• Dig toward the low cards. Aces and twos are pure profit: they empty space and they can never be needed in the tableau. A move that uncovers one is nearly always worth making before a move that merely tidies.
• Don't be in a hurry to send the middle ranks home. The page only auto-plays a card when it provably can never be needed to hold a lower card of the other colour; everything above that line is your judgement. Holding a black 7 in the tableau to catch a red 6 is regularly better than banking the point.
• Stuck is not the same as lost. Because the deal was solved before you saw it, a winning line definitely exists. Undo back to the last branch where you had a choice — usually the move where you filled the third cell — and take the other one.

More games

More from 🃏 Card & solitaire games:

• Spider Solitaire — One suit, ten columns, eight runs to build. Make an empty column early or you'll wish you had.
• Mahjong Solitaire — Match free tiles two at a time and dig the stack apart. Every board is dealt solvable.
• TriPeaks Solitaire — The quick one. Run cards up and down the ranks in one long chain — eight in a row is worth four times eight singles.
• Golf Solitaire — Seven columns, one card in the tray. Take anything a rank above or below it — and the cards you leave behind are your score.
• Pyramid Solitaire — Twenty-eight cards, one rule: every pair you remove has to add up to thirteen. Kings go alone.

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