FreeCell

How to play FreeCell

FreeCell deals all 52 cards face up into eight cascades — the first four columns get seven cards, the last four get six. Above them sit four free cells, each able to hold any single card, and four foundations, one per suit. Your goal is to move every card onto the foundations, built upward from Ace to King in suit.

Only the top card of a cascade (or a card parked in a cell) can move, and it can go to four places: its foundation, if it is the next rank in suit; an empty free cell; onto a cascade card one rank higher of the opposite colour — a red Six on a black Seven; or into an empty cascade, which accepts any card at all. That last rule is the big difference from Klondike, where empty columns are reserved for Kings.

The right mental model is that cells are power. Every empty cell and every empty column is manoeuvring room — capacity to dig out the card you actually need. Because everything is visible from the first moment, nothing is hidden and nothing is luck after the deal: FreeCell is pure planning, which is exactly why nearly every deal can be won by someone patient enough.

The supermove, explained honestly

Strictly speaking, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. When this version lets you drag a whole run — a descending, alternating-colour sequence — in one action, that is only a shortcut for the tedious card-by-card shuffle through your spare cells and columns, and that is why the size limit exists rather than being an arbitrary rule. With n empty cells you can relocate n + 1 cards: park n of them, move the base card, unpark. Each empty cascade then doubles the total, because half of a run can wait there while the other half travels. Hence the classic formula: (1 + empty cells) × 2 for every empty cascade. One honest wrinkle: if the run’s destination is itself an empty cascade, that column cannot also serve as a waystation, so it does not count toward the doubling. The move counter and undo treat a supermove as a single move — which it is, in intent.

Strategy that actually wins deals

• Free the Aces and Twos early. Find them in the layout before your first move and dig toward them first — every card sent to a foundation is a card that never clogs a cell or column again. The game safely auto-plays low cards for you the moment they are exposed.
• Do not fill all four cells. Each occupied cell shrinks your biggest movable run — from five cards with all cells free down to one with none. A full set of cells is FreeCell’s version of checkmate: park cards briefly, with a plan for getting each one back down.
• An empty column beats an empty cell. A cell holds one card; an empty cascade holds a whole run, accepts anything, and doubles your supermove capacity. Emptying a short column early — usually one of the six-card columns — is the strongest single manoeuvre in the game.
• Plan the whole excavation before touching a column. Since every card is visible, you can trace the full sequence: which cards must move, where each one lands, and whether you have the capacity for the worst step. If the line dead-ends in your head, it will dead-end on the table — find a better order before you spend your cells.
• Keep the foundations roughly level. A card you send up can never come back down in this version, and a black Four sent up early may be exactly the landing spot a red Three needed. The built-in auto-play is deliberately conservative for the same reason — it only sends cards that can never be needed below.

Numbered deals and the legend of #11982

Every deal here has a number, and the numbering is Microsoft-compatible: the same shuffle algorithm that FreeCell shipped with on Windows, using your deal number as the seed. Deal #164 on this page is card-for-card the deal #164 a friend will get on theirs — or got on a beige PC in 1995. Use Choose deal to enter any number from 1 to 1,000,000, and when you share a result the deal number rides along, so anyone can replay exactly the deal you just played.

Numbered deals are also why FreeCell’s winnability is a matter of record rather than folklore. Of the original 32,000 Windows deals, players organised online to attempt every single one — and all but one fell. The lone survivor, deal #11982, has since been proven unsolvable by exhaustive computer search. Across the full million deals used here, only a handful more join it (146692, 186216, 455889, 495505, 512118, 517776 and 781948). So the honest claim is that effectively every deal can be won — not by decree, but because people checked. You are welcome to deal #11982 yourself; think of it as a pilgrimage, not a puzzle.

About this version

This is duplixo’s own implementation — free, with no sign-up and no ads sitting on top of the cards. Your game is saved on your device as you play and resumes if you close the tab; your wins, best time, fewest moves and streaks live in the stats panel, stored only in this browser. It plays with a mouse, by touch, or entirely from the keyboard — every card, cell and column is a real button, so you can Tab to a card, press Enter to pick it up and Enter again on its destination. Undo is unlimited, and safe cards are auto-played to the foundations without touching your move count.

If you run out of legal moves, the game says so and offers a way back — with unlimited undo you can always rewind to the turning point and try a different line, and outside that famous handful of deals a winning line exists. There is deliberately no hint button: honest FreeCell hints require solving the deal, and we would rather not pretend otherwise.

Prefer hidden cards and a little luck with your patience? Play Klondike Solitaire — the draw-1-or-3 classic. Want the two-deck marathon instead? Spider Solitaire runs at one, two or four suits. Or trade cards for tiles entirely with Mahjong Solitaire, where every deal is guaranteed clearable.