How to Play FreeCell — Rules and Tips

A card game where all 52 cards lie face up from the very first move, so judgement counts for more than luck. The rules fit in five lines, yet every deal needs a different route.

The goal

Build the four foundations at the top right — clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades — each in order from ace to king. Once all 52 cards are home, the deal is won.

The layout

Basic rules

• In the columns, build downward in alternating colours. Only a red 8 (♥8 or ♦8) can go on the ♠9.
• Each of the four free cells holds one card of any kind. From there it can move back to a column or up to a foundation.
• An empty column takes any card, or any sequence.
• Cards on the foundations never come back down.

Moving sequences — why five cards work and six don't

It looks as if you move several cards at once, but in FreeCell you can only ever move one card at a time. The screen simply does the shuffling for you: it parks cards in empty free cells and empty columns, then stacks them again. That is why the number of cards you can move in one go is limited.

With all four free cells empty and no empty column you can move 5 cards; with one empty column, 10. Fill a single free cell and the limit drops straight to 4. You don't need to memorise the formula, but it pays to know how expensive one free cell is. Set the card speed to 'Slow' and you can watch the process one card at a time.

What winning players do

They empty a column first

Empty columns sit in the exponent of the formula. Clearing a column is worth twice as much as freeing a free cell. Spot the columns with few cards left early on, and clear those first.

They use free cells last

Putting a card in a free cell spends a resource that shrinks as you use it. With all four cells full you can move just one card, which in practice means you can do almost nothing. If a card can go from column to column instead, look at that first.

Aces and twos go up at once; the rest can wait

This game only moves a card home automatically when doing so can never cost you. Aces and twos are always safe, because no card will ever need to sit on them. But send the ♥5 home early and a black 4 may lose the spot it needed — that really does happen. So a card goes up by itself only once both suits of the opposite colour are already built to one rank below it.

They decide early where the kings will go

A king can't be placed on any card, so it can only go into an empty column. A king buried mid-column will one day take up a whole empty column. Decide early which kings to free and which to leave, and the middle game won't jam.

They undo before they're stuck

When no moves are left, the screen tells you. If something feels wrong before that, it's quicker to undo back to the fork in the road. In solo play, undo carries no penalty.

FreeCell on this site — deal numbers

One number, one deal. #617 is the same layout whenever and wherever you open it, so everyone who has played the same number can compete on fastest time and fewest moves. Send a friend the number and you can both play the same deal.

We never deal you an unsolvable game

Before a number is opened, a solver actually plays that deal through. If an unsolvable deal slipped out, whoever drew that number could spend hours on it and never know whether the problem was their play or the deal.

We checked all 20,000 FreeCell deals and found not a single unsolvable one. It is a measured confirmation that randomly shuffled FreeCell deals are almost always winnable. With a budget of 3 seconds per deal, half of the deals were settled within 4 milliseconds, and the slowest took 2.9 seconds.

Where a number's deal was unsolvable, or couldn't be settled in time, we didn't close it — we gave that number a different layout. The numbers stay continuous, so you'll never wonder why #5879 is missing.

Controls

• Tap a card and it goes to the most sensible spot by itself.
• Drag a card to choose the spot yourself. When you pick it up, the places it can go light up.
• Undo also takes back any cards that moved up automatically, in a single step.
• Tap ⁉️ in the header above the board to read the rules on the spot. The clock stops while you read.

Further reading