How to play FreeCell

Move all 52 cards onto the four foundations, building each suit up from ace to king. Unlike most solitaires, nearly every FreeCell deal can be won.

The whole deck is dealt face up into eight cascades: seven cards in the first four, six in the rest. Four free cells sit empty in the corner, each able to hold one card.

On the cascades, build downward in alternating colors: a red ten on a black jack.
Park any single card in an empty free cell, and bring it back down when you need it.
Runs move together only when you have the workspace: one extra card per empty cell, doubled for every empty cascade.
Empty cascades accept any card. Aces start the foundations.

Tips

Keep your free cells empty as long as you can; a full cell row is how games die.
Dig out aces and twos early, and plan the whole route before you commit.
An empty cascade is worth more than any free cell; earn one and guard it.

FreeCell looks like Klondike at first glance: cascades of cards, foundations, a green table. But the deal works completely differently, and that changes everything about how you play. Every one of the 52 cards goes down face up right from the start, so there's no hidden pile and no card you haven't seen yet. Once the deal lands, you're looking at the entire problem, which makes FreeCell less about luck or memory and more like a logic puzzle: the pieces are all there, and the only question is whether you can find the order that clears them.

The short rules above tell you what moves are legal. This is about what actually decides a game: using the four free cells without choking on them, when a supermove is worth taking, why an empty cascade beats a full one, and how often a FreeCell deal can be won in the first place.

Nothing hidden, so it's a puzzle, not a guess

In Klondike, half your cards start face down, and a lot of the game is finding out what's under there before you can plan around it. FreeCell skips that step. You see every card before your first move, so a stuck game is never bad luck: it's a plan that didn't work, or a move made without checking where it led. The deal isn't hiding anything; the solution, if there is one, was visible from turn one.

That also means undo isn't a crutch here the way it might be elsewhere. Backing out a few moves and trying a different route is the game working as intended. Treat a stuck line like a wrong guess in a puzzle: back up and try the branch you skipped.

Free cells and the supermove

The four free cells in the corner each hold exactly one card, parked there until you need it back. Their real power shows up when you move a whole run of cards at once. A run only moves as one unit if you've got the space to shuffle it there behind the scenes, and that space comes from empty free cells and empty cascades. Each empty free cell lets you move one extra card at a time; each empty cascade doubles whatever that number already is. Four empty cells and one empty cascade turn a single-card move into a ten-card move.

That's the supermove, and it's why free cells and empty cascades matter more than their small footprint suggests. The game won't let you attempt a move you don't have room for, but it's worth knowing why a run that looked movable a moment ago suddenly isn't: you spent the space it needed somewhere else.

Guard your free cells, and work toward an empty cascade

It's tempting to park a card in a free cell the moment it's in your way. Do that a few times without a plan and you'll fill all four cells, leaving no workspace for anything, including the supermove that would have gotten you out of the jam. Free cells are a resource you spend, not a place to dump problems: before you park a card, have some idea of when it's coming back out.

The flip side is worth chasing on purpose: getting a cascade down to nothing. An empty cascade takes any card, king or otherwise, and it doubles your supermove capacity on top of that, so it's far more valuable than a free cell that only holds one card. A single empty column can be the difference between a plan that works and one that runs out of road.

Plan the route before you commit

Because the whole deal is visible, FreeCell rewards reading ahead more than reacting move to move. A card that looks like a safe parking spot in a free cell right now can turn out to be the exact card blocking the move you need three turns later. Before you commit to a sequence, especially one that uses up a free cell or breaks up a run you might need, try to see two or three moves past it. A careless order of otherwise fine moves can turn a winnable deal into a dead one: the cards don't change, but the order you play them in decides whether you can still reach all of them.

How winnable is FreeCell, really

FreeCell has the best odds of any game on this site, by a wide margin. The version that shipped with Windows used a fixed set of 32,000 numbered deals, and in 1994 and 1995 a volunteer effort called the Internet FreeCell Project, organized by Dave Ring, worked through that set by hand and solved all but one deal. Only #11,982 turned out to be unsolvable: 31,999 out of 32,000, or about 99.997%. A separate solver-based study by researchers Charlie Blake and Ian Gent landed on almost the same figure from a different sample of random deals. See the FreeCell FAQ at solitairelaboratory.com for the original project's summary.

Almost always winnable is not the same as easy. That number describes whether a solution exists, not whether you'll stumble onto it. You still have to find the line, and because FreeCell punishes a clogged free cell so directly, a careless sequence of otherwise-legal moves can strand you in a position that's unwinnable, even though the original deal wasn't. The deals here are seeded and random, never filtered for winnability. The odds are about as good as solitaire gets. They're not a guarantee.