No luck left to blame

FreeCell Solitaire

Every card is face up before you move, there is no stock and nothing in reserve, and virtually every deal can be finished. FreeCell is the solitaire game where losing is a mistake rather than a shuffle.

Nothing hidden
Four free cells
Any card fills a space
Almost always solvable

Foundations0/52

Free cells0

Moves0

Free cells

Foundations

Build each suit up from ace to king.

Four cells, eight columns

FreeCell Solitaire rules

Short, because FreeCell has no stock, no hidden cards and no special cases. Almost all of the game is in the capacity rule further down.

FreeCell Solitaire setup and rules
Setup
Deck	One standard 52-card deck.
Tableau	Eight columns: four of seven cards and four of six. Every card is face up.
Free cells	Four, each holding exactly one card.
Foundations	Four, one per suit, empty at the start.
Stock	None. There is nothing to draw and nothing in reserve.
Moving
Tableau	Builds down in alternating colours. A red 8 takes a black 7.
Foundations	Build up by exact suit, ace through king.
Free cells	Any single exposed card can go into an empty cell, and come back out later.
Empty columns	Accept any card or any movable sequence — not kings only.
Sequences	A packed run moves as a unit, up to the capacity in the table below.
Winning
Win condition	All 52 cards on the four foundations.
Losing	Only by running out of legal moves. There is no timer and no stock to exhaust.

Nothing hidden at all

How to play FreeCell Solitaire

All 52 cards are dealt into eight columns, face up: four columns of seven and four of six. Above them sit four empty cells and four empty foundations. That is the entire game — there is no stock, no waste, no reserve and nothing to turn over.

Columns build down in alternating colours, exactly as in Klondike. Foundations build up by suit from ace to king. A free cell holds one card, any card, and you can take it back out whenever it has somewhere legal to go. An empty column will take anything at all.

What makes FreeCell a different game from every other tableau builder is what it withholds: luck. You can see everything from the first move. If the deal is lost, it was lost by a decision you made, and you can usually point at which one.

A famous result

Almost every FreeCell deal can be won

FreeCell is unusual among classic solitaire games in being very nearly always solvable. The best-known evidence comes from the original Microsoft version, which shipped 32,000 numbered deals: in the mid-1990s a distributed volunteer effort worked through all of them and solved every single one except deal 11,982, which was eventually proved impossible.

For randomly shuffled deals — which is what this page gives you — the unsolvable fraction is vanishingly small. In practice you should assume every deal you are handed can be finished, and treat a loss as a puzzle you got wrong rather than a hand you were dealt.

This page does not use Microsoft's deal numbering, so there is no 11,982 to look for here. It also does not filter deals, because with FreeCell there is almost nothing to filter out.

Cells and columns

What the free cells make possible

Legal and illegal FreeCell moves
The move	Verdict	Why
A column ends in the black 9. You move a red 8 onto it.	Legal	One rank down, opposite colour — the only tableau rule.
You move a red 8 with a black 7 and red 6 attached.	Legal	Already a valid run, and within capacity if you have cells or spaces free.
You drop any single card into an empty cell.	Legal	Cells accept anything. Getting it out again is the hard part.
You move a queen into an empty column.	Legal	Unlike Klondike, spaces are not reserved for kings.
You move two cards with only one free cell and no spaces.	Illegal	Capacity is (cells + 1) × 2^spaces. One free cell and no spaces allows two — with none free, only one.
You move a card out of a foundation back to the tableau.	Illegal	Foundations are one-way on this page.
You put two cards in the same free cell.	Illegal	One card per cell, always.

The rule that is the game

How many cards you can move at once

Strictly, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. Dragging a run of five is shorthand for parking four cards somewhere and putting them back — so the number you can move depends entirely on how much empty space you have.

The rule this page uses is the standard one: (free cells + 1) × 2 to the power of empty columns. Free cells add to the total. Empty columns double it. That asymmetry is the single most important thing to understand about FreeCell, and it is why experienced players will burn several moves to open a column they do not immediately need.

Maximum sequence length you can move
Free cells open	No empty columns	1 empty column	2 empty columns
0	1	2	4
1	2	4	8
2	3	6	12
3	4	8	16
4	5	10	20

One empty column is worth more than all four cells. Going from no cells to four takes you from moving one card to five. Adding a single empty column on top of that takes you from five to ten, and a second takes you to twenty. Cells add; spaces multiply — which is why "should I use a cell or open a column" almost always answers itself.

How many can move

FreeCell strategy

Because nothing is hidden, FreeCell rewards looking before moving more than any other game here. The strongest habit is to find the aces first and count what sits on top of them. Those cards are your real objective; everything else is scaffolding to get at them.

Treat the cells as a workspace rather than storage. A card in a cell costs you capacity for as long as it stays there, so before parking anything, know how it comes back out. If the answer is "when a red 7 turns up", and both red 7s are buried at the bottom of long columns, that cell is gone for the rest of the game.

Be slower with foundations than instinct suggests. Sending a card up is irreversible on this page, and a 5 that looked spare is exactly what the tableau needs to unload a 4 three moves later. Aces and twos always go; past that, ask whether the tableau still wants it.

Finally, when a position looks stuck, count your capacity before concluding it is. Players give up on deals that a single well-chosen cell-emptying move would have opened, because they were thinking in cards rather than in the capacity formula.

Three ways to waste a cell

Where FreeCell deals are actually lost

These are not the reverse of the advice above. Each is a position that looks fine when you create it and is unrecoverable two dozen moves later.

Filling all four cells early

A card in a cell is not stored, it is stranded — it can only leave onto a foundation or onto a legal tableau card. Four full cells means capacity one, which means you can move exactly one card at a time, which usually means the deal is over.

Filling an empty column to tidy up

An empty column is worth more than any card you could put in it. Dropping a lone queen into a space to clear a cell trades your most valuable asset for your second-cheapest.

Burying an ace under a long tidy run

Because everything is visible it is easy to build an elegant descending run on top of the exact ace you needed. Nothing is hidden, so this one is always avoidable — check what is underneath before you build.

This version

What this FreeCell does

Four free cells and eight columns — the standard configuration.
Empty columns take any card or any movable sequence, not kings only.
Sequence moves use the (cells + 1) × 2^spaces capacity rule.
Foundations are one-way; cards do not come back down.
Deals are randomly shuffled, with no Microsoft-style deal numbers.

Undo is unlimited and unpenalised. There is no timer and no score. We do not publish a win rate for this page, because for FreeCell it would measure the player rather than the game.

Where deals are really lost

FreeCell against its nearest relatives

Two games on this site share FreeCell's open information and change one rule each. Both are harder, and comparing them shows how much of FreeCell's fairness comes from the space rule rather than the visibility.

FreeCell compared with Klondike, Eight Off, and Seahaven Towers
Game	Hidden at deal	Empty columns take	Stock	Solvable?
FreeCell	Nothing	Any card	None	Almost every deal
Klondike	21 cards	Kings only	Draw one, unlimited	Many deals cannot be won
Eight Off	Nothing	Kings only	None	Most deals, but tighter
Seahaven Towers	Nothing	Kings only	None	Harder — same-suit packing

Eight Off gives you twice as many cells and takes away the free use of spaces, and it is noticeably harder — more evidence for the doubling rule above. If you want the same open information with a genuinely punishing ruleset, Seahaven Towers packs by suit rather than by colour, which removes most of the moves you are used to having.

Explore

More solitaire games

Try another open-information game, or something with the luck put back in.

Tested rules

How this solitaire game is checked

Game logic is implemented and tested by Brian Hamilton, then reviewed by Karan Hamilton for rule clarity, player flow, and correction notes.

How we make and test solitaire games