FreeCell Solitaire, Classic Card Game
Play FreeCell solitaire free in your browser. All cards face up, four free cells, undo, timer and auto-move. No download needed.
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FreeCell is the thinking player's solitaire: a single-deck patience game in which every one of the 52 cards is dealt face up, so nothing is hidden and nearly every deal can be won with enough foresight. The game descends from a Scandinavian patience called Eight Off, and its modern form was described by Paul Alfille, who programmed the first computer version on the PLATO educational system at the University of Illinois in 1978. FreeCell became a household name when Jim Horne's version shipped with the Microsoft Entertainment Pack and then with Windows 95. The Windows edition's numbered deals, all 32,000 of them in the original release, sparked one of the earliest internet crowdsourcing projects, when volunteers set out to prove every deal solvable.
Frequently asked questions
How do I move cards in FreeCell?
How many cards can I move at once?
What are the free cells for?
Are all FreeCell games winnable?
What does the auto-move option do?
What is the best strategy for FreeCell?
Can I undo my moves?
Who invented FreeCell?
Is my progress or best time saved?
How is FreeCell different from Klondike Solitaire?
About FreeCell Solitaire, Classic Card Game
The layout is simple. Eight cascades are dealt across the table, the first four holding seven cards and the last four holding six, all face up. Above them sit four free cells, each able to hold any single card as temporary storage, and four foundations, one per suit, to be built from Ace up to King. Within the cascades you build downward in alternating colours, a red 6 goes on a black 7. Any card may be placed on an empty cascade. Strictly speaking, FreeCell allows only one card to move at a time, but moving a whole ordered sequence is a standard shortcut: the number of cards you can relocate in one go equals the number of empty free cells plus one, doubled for every empty cascade you can route through. This version enforces that limit exactly and tells you the current maximum when a move is too large.
Because all information is visible from the first move, FreeCell rewards planning over luck more than any other mainstream solitaire. The core strategic principles are: free your Aces and low cards early, keep the free cells as empty as possible (a full set of cells is usually a lost game), and treat empty cascades as the most powerful resource on the table since each one doubles your moving capacity. Try to empty a whole cascade rather than scattering cards into the cells, and think a few moves ahead before burying a card you will soon need. Of the original 32,000 Microsoft deals, all but one (the famous game #11982) proved winnable, so if you are stuck, the deal is almost never to blame.
This browser version implements the full standard rules: eight cascades, four free cells, four foundations, alternating-colour building and the exact supermove limit with a clear explanation whenever a transfer needs more space than you currently have. It adds multi-level undo, a move counter, a timer, optional automatic movement of cards that are safe to send to the foundations, and win statistics with your best time and best move count stored locally in your browser. Everything runs client-side: no account, no download, no data leaving your device, on desktop, tablet or phone.
FreeCell: The Solitaire Game the Internet Proved Solvable
FreeCell's roots go back further than most players suspect. A near-identical game called Eight Off, with eight storage cells and building in suit, circulated in the 20th century, and Martin Gardner described a related ancestor in his Scientific American column in 1968. The decisive step came in 1978, when medical student Paul Alfille modified the rules to use four cells and alternating-colour building, and programmed the game on PLATO, a pioneering computer education network at the University of Illinois. Alfille's version already supported tournaments and statistics, making FreeCell one of the very first computer card games with an online community, more than a decade before the web existed.
The game reached the mainstream through Jim Horne, who licensed the concept for the Microsoft Entertainment Pack in 1991 and whose version was bundled with Windows 95. That release included exactly 32,000 numbered deals, and it shipped with a mischievous line in the help file suggesting that it may be impossible to win some games, a statement nobody at Microsoft had verified. In 1994, programmer Dave Ring organised the Internet FreeCell Project, distributing the 32,000 deals among about 100 volunteers who played and reported back. By 1995 every deal had been solved except one: game #11982, which no human or computer program has ever beaten and which is now accepted as genuinely unsolvable. The project stands as one of the earliest examples of crowdsourced computation on the internet.
FreeCell has since become a favourite object of study for mathematicians and computer scientists. Generalised FreeCell, played with arbitrary numbers of cards and cells, has been proved NP-complete, placing it in the same complexity family as the travelling salesman problem, and modern solvers estimate that about 99.999% of all possible standard deals are winnable. The game also holds a place in software folklore: because it shipped on every Windows machine and demanded real thought, it became the unofficial pastime of programmers and sysadmins, and the Windows XP version's statistics screen, with its uninterrupted win streaks, turned into a badge of honour that players guarded for years.