How to play
Fifty-two cards are dealt face up into eight columns. Above them sit four free cells, which hold one card each, and four foundations, which have to be filled from ace to king in a single suit. Move every card to the foundations and the deal is won.
Inside the columns, a card can only land on a card one rank higher of the opposite colour — a red six goes on a black seven. An empty column takes anything. Drag a card where you want it, or click it once to pick it up and click again to send it to the best place the rules allow.
You can also drag a whole run at once — a black nine, red eight, black seven, say. The game is really shuttling them through the free cells one at a time, so the length you can carry is (empty cells + 1) × 2empty columns. With two cells and one empty column free, that is six cards.
Controls
- Drag — carry a card or a run to a column, a free cell, or a foundation
- Click — pick a card up; click a destination to drop it
- Click twice — send the card wherever the rules allow, foundation first
- Z or U — undo (as far back as you like)
- R — restart this deal
- N — a new random deal
- Esc — put the picked-up card down
Strategy tips
- Empty columns beat empty cells. A free cell holds one card; an empty column holds a whole run and doubles how much you can carry. Getting the first column clear is usually the turning point of the deal.
- Dig for the aces first, but do not spend all four cells doing it. A position with every cell full has almost no moves left, and that is how deals are lost.
- Look for the kings. A king buried under six cards is a column you will never empty; a king at the bottom of a column costs nothing. Plan around where they sit before you touch anything.
- Do not send everything up. A five still on the table can catch a four you need to unload later. Auto-play only promotes cards that have been proved safe for exactly this reason.
- Undo is free. Every deal here is a puzzle with a solution, not a gamble — when a line dead-ends, take it back and try the other order.
About FreeCell
FreeCell was written in its modern form by Paul Alfille on the PLATO system in 1978, and reached almost every desk in the world when Microsoft shipped it with Windows in 1992. Unlike most solitaires, nothing is hidden: the whole deal is in front of you from the first second, so a lost game is a mistake rather than bad luck.
This edition uses the original Microsoft deal numbers. Deal #617 here is the same 52 cards as deal #617 on any other FreeCell in the world, so a number is all you need to hand somebody the exact game you played. Nothing is stored in the page — the deal is rebuilt from its number by the same random generator Windows used.
The 32,000 classic deals were solved by a volunteer project in the 1990s, and every single one turned out to be winnable except deal #11982, which was later proved impossible. So unless you go looking for that one, every game you are dealt here can be won.
If you want the other side of that coin, try Klondike Solitaire next door: same cards, most of them face down, so the order you turn them in is the game.