FreeCell
Also known as Free Cell, FreeCell Solitaire
- Players
- 1 player
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 10-30 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Category
- Solitaire (1 player)
Setup
Take one 52-card deck without jokers, shuffle it, and deal the whole pack face up into eight tableau columns: seven cards each to the first four columns and six each to the last four. Spread each column so that every card in it stays readable, with the last card of the column fully exposed.
Above or beside the tableau, set out four free cells on one side and four foundation spaces on the other. All eight start empty.
That is the entire layout. There is no stock, no waste and no redeal, and nothing is dealt face down. From the first move to the last you are working with complete information, which is what separates FreeCell from Klondike and Spider. No new card can turn up, so a deal is a puzzle that is already either solvable or not before you touch it.
Play
The foundations are built up in suit from the ace to the king, one foundation per suit. The tableau columns are built down in alternating colours, so a black jack accepts a red 10 and that red 10 accepts a black 9.
Strictly speaking exactly one card moves at a time, and it has to be either the exposed card at the end of a column or a card sitting in a free cell. You can send it to:
- a foundation, if it is the next rank up in that suit;
- a tableau column whose end card is one rank higher and the opposite colour;
- an empty free cell, which holds exactly one card and imposes no other condition;
- an empty column, which accepts any single card at all. Unlike Klondike, empty columns are not reserved for kings, and this is the most powerful resource in the game.
A card parked in a free cell is fully available and can be played out again to a column or a foundation whenever it fits. The only cost of using a cell is that it is no longer free for manoeuvring.
Computer versions let you drag a whole run at once, which is the supermove, also called a power move. It is not a separate rule. It is shorthand for a run of ordinary single-card moves that the software performs for you: the upper cards of the run get shuffled into free cells and empty columns, the bottom card is moved, and the run is rebuilt on top of it. The number of cards you can shift this way is therefore capped by the workspace you have:
maximum cards = (1 + empty free cells) x 2 ^ (empty columns)
Read it as two separate effects: every free cell adds one to what you can carry, and every empty column doubles whatever that comes to. Four cells with nothing else spare will therefore shift five cards, and freeing a single column on top of them takes the same four cells to ten. The exception is the destination itself. A column you are moving into cannot double as workspace, so it drops out of the exponent — dropping a run into your only empty column with all four cells free gets you five cards rather than ten.
That is what a careful player can actually achieve by hand, one card at a time. Programs vary in how much of that they manage. Microsoft's own versions up to Windows XP handled one empty column correctly but did not get the most out of two or more, and with no cell free they treated an empty column as though it were a cell. If your version refuses a move you think should be legal, that is usually why. Nothing is lost either way: the supermove is only a convenience, and you can always perform the same transfer one card at a time.
The run you are moving must already be a proper descending, alternating-colour sequence. A stack that merely sits together is not movable as a block, and if you do not have the storage for the whole run you have to break it up by hand.
In the standard game a card sent to a foundation stays there. Some programs let you bring it back down — worrying back, in the English phrase — either as their ordinary rule or as a setting you switch on, so check before you count on it. It matters less than it sounds: across the first hundred million deals, 69 are winnable only that way.
No move is ever compulsory. You are never obliged to send an ace or any other card to a foundation, and holding a low card back in the tableau to catch the next card down is a standard technique. Many programs autoplay cards to the foundations for you once they can no longer be needed; that is a convenience setting, not a rule, and it can usually be switched off.
The deal ends when all four foundations reach their kings, or when you are stuck: all four free cells occupied, no empty column, and nothing among the four cell cards and the eight column ends that fits onto a foundation or onto another column. Because nothing is hidden, being stuck is always the end of that deal; there is no redeal and no reshuffle.
Goal & scoring
You win by moving all 52 cards onto the foundations, each suit in order from ace up to king. FreeCell keeps no points in its traditional form. A deal is won or lost, and players who want a finer measure compare move counts or elapsed time on the same numbered deal rather than tallying a score.
The interesting number in FreeCell is how often a deal can be won at all. Because every card is visible and four cells is a generous allowance, nearly every deal has a solution: solvers put it at roughly 99.999 percent of random deals. Microsoft's original set of 32,000 numbered deals contains exactly one that has been proven impossible, deal 11,982, and establishing that took a volunteer effort running through the mid-1990s. The same generator has been run a great deal further than that. Of the first ten million deals, 130 are unsolvable; eight of them fall inside the first million — 11,982, 146,692, 186,216, 455,889, 495,505, 512,118, 517,776 and 781,948.
Losing a FreeCell deal is therefore almost always your mistake rather than the shuffle's, which is both the appeal and the cruelty of the game. Solvable does not mean easy, though. Asked which of the 32,000 is hardest without being impossible, solvers tend to name 1,941, with 10,692 the other candidate. Deal 617 is the most asked-about of the lot, which is a different thing: it is the first really awkward deal you meet playing them in order, and it is a good deal easier than 1,941. Working through the numbered deals in order is a long-running informal challenge.
Variants
Baker's Game — The game FreeCell was derived from. Identical layout and identical four free cells, but the tableau builds down in suit instead of alternating colours. Removing colour-based landing spots roughly halves the places any card can go, and winnability drops from near-certainty to somewhere around three quarters of deals, so a lost game here is much less likely to be your fault.
Eight Off — Eight free cells rather than four. Deal 48 cards into eight columns of six, then place the remaining four cards one each into four of the eight cells, leaving four cells open. The tableau builds down in suit, and only a king may be moved into an empty column. The extra cells are compensation for both of those tighter restrictions.
Seahaven Towers — Fifty cards go into ten columns of five, and the last two cards are placed into two of the four free cells, leaving two open. The tableau builds down in suit and only kings may fill an empty column. With ten short columns, two occupied cells and no colour alternation, it plays much more tightly than FreeCell and rewards planning several moves ahead.
ForeCell — Deal four cards face up into the four free cells first, then 48 cards into eight columns of six. You start with every cell full, so your first job is emptying them. The tableau builds down in alternating colours as in FreeCell, but only a king may be moved into an empty column, which removes the escape hatch that makes standard FreeCell so forgiving.
Rules checked against Wikipedia, Solitaire Laboratory, Solitaire Central, BVS Solitaire, PlayFreeCellOnline, Freecell Solver documentation (Shlomi Fish).