FreeCell: rules and free online play

Goal of the game

In the end, all 52 cards should sit on the four foundations – one per suit (spades, hearts, clubs, diamonds), each built up from ace to king. The ace is the lowest card.

Unlike Solitaire (Klondike), there’s no stock and no face-down cards: you see the whole deck from the very first move. The trick is to rearrange the eight columns so the right cards come free in order. The four free cells serve as temporary storage along the way.

Setup: eight columns, four cells, four foundations

All 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns: the first four columns get 7 cards each, the other four get 6. The four free cells are at the top left, the four foundations at the top right. If an ace ends up on top of a column in the deal, it goes straight to its foundation.

Deals follow the well-known game numbers of Microsoft FreeCell, from 1 to 1,000,000 – so game #1 at Tavern Jack looks exactly like it did in classic FreeCell on Windows. The game number is shown at the table, so you always know which deal you’re playing.

Building in the columns

In the columns you build down in alternating colours: on a black 10 (spades or clubs) goes a red 9 (hearts or diamonds), then a black 8 and so on. Hearts or diamonds doesn’t matter – only red or black counts.

You can move the top card of a column – or several top cards at once if they already form a proper run (more on that below).

An empty column is valuable: any card can go there, not just a king – and so can a fitting run. The only thing you can’t do is move an entire column into an empty one; it wouldn’t achieve anything.

The free cells

Each of the four free cells holds exactly one card. That’s where you park a card that’s in the way – a king with an ace underneath, for example. From a cell, the card can go back at any time to a column where it fits or that’s empty, or straight to its foundation.

Full cells make the game tight: the fewer cells are free, the less room you have to rearrange and the shorter the runs you can move. So try to get cards out again soon.

Moving runs: how many cards at once?

Strictly speaking, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. You can still move a run that goes down in alternating colours in one go – as long as there’s enough room to shift it card by card via the free cells and empty columns. At Tavern Jack the game does the shifting for you, and the table always shows how long a run you can currently move.

The number of cards you can move at once is (free cells + 1) × 2 to the power of (empty columns). If the run itself is going into an empty column, that column doesn’t count. A few examples:

• 4 free cells, no empty column: 5 cards
• 2 free cells, 1 empty column: (2 + 1) × 2 = 6 cards
• 1 free cell, 2 empty columns: (1 + 1) × 4 = 8 cards
• 3 free cells and 1 empty column that the run is going into: (3 + 1) × 1 = 4 cards
• No free cell, no empty column: just 1 card

The foundations

Each foundation starts with an ace and continues upward in the same suit: Ace of Hearts, 2 of Hearts, 3 of Hearts … up to the King of Hearts. A card can go to its foundation from the top of a column or from a free cell. Once a card is on a foundation, it stays there – at Tavern Jack, cards can’t go back to the columns.

Many cards go to the foundations by themselves: aces and twos always, any other card as soon as it fits and no other card needs it as a base any more – that is, once both cards of the other colour with the next lower value are already home. The 5 of Hearts, for example, goes up by itself once the 4 of Spades and the 4 of Clubs are on their foundations. That doesn’t count as a move, but you still get the points.

End and scoring

You win when all 52 cards are on the foundations. If the rest can be played off with foundation moves only, “Auto-finish” does it for you. You can undo as often as you like – up to 300 steps back – and “Hint” shows you a move. If you’re stuck, you can give up – your points so far then count. Scoring uses no clock:

• Card to a foundation: +10 points (also when it goes up by itself)
• Undoing a move: −10 points
• Your score never drops below 0.
• Win bonus: 700 points minus 2 points per move (never below 0). Every move you make counts – undos too, and every card “Auto-finish” plays – but cards that go up by themselves don’t. The fewer moves, the bigger the bonus.

Daily FreeCell: a guaranteed solvable deal every day

Almost every FreeCell deal can be solved, but not quite all of them: among the first 32,000 Microsoft deals only game #11982 is unsolvable, and even among all 1,000,000 game numbers there are only a handful. In the Daily FreeCell everyone gets the same deal on the same day – and before it’s dealt, a solver checks that it really comes out.

Your first run of the day counts for the daily leaderboard. Every move is replayed on the server, so there’s no cheating. You can share your result spoiler-free – with the game number, the cards you got home, the number of moves and how often you undid something.

History and variants

Paul Alfille programmed the first computer version of FreeCell in 1978; the game became famous through Windows, which shipped it for many years. Baker’s Game is considered its forerunner: there, columns are built down by suit (hearts on hearts) instead of in alternating colours – which makes it a lot harder.

Other versions use fewer free cells – with three, two or only one cell, FreeCell gets noticeably harder. In Seahaven Towers the cards lie in ten columns, two cards start in the cells, columns are built by suit and only kings may go into empty columns.

At Tavern Jack you play classic FreeCell: four cells, building in alternating colours, any card into an empty column, runs in one go (as far as the room allows), no cards back from the foundations, and cards nothing needs any more go home automatically.