FreeCell: History, Records and Competitions

FreeCell began around 1978 as a medical student's program on a university computer and reached the world through Windows. Numbered deals, an early crowd-solving project, the one deal nobody could win — most of its history grows from a single idea: many people playing the same deal.

September 23, 2026 · 7-minute read

Origins and name

FreeCell's direct ancestor is Baker's Game. Martin Gardner described it in his "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American in June 1968, crediting it to C. L. Baker, who learned it from his father, who learned it from an Englishman in the 1920s. The layout matches FreeCell's; the one difference is that columns are built by suit.

Paul Alfille changed that one rule to alternating colours. Every card now had two possible landing spots instead of one, and nearly every deal became winnable: a 2026 study by Charlie Blake and Ian Gent puts Baker's Game at about 75% and FreeCell at over 99.998%. The name seems to be Alfille's too ("I think I made up the name," he said in 2000); on PLATO it was written "Free Cell".

Alternating colours weren't entirely new. Einar Werner's Swedish card book, dating back at least to 1945, describes "Napoleon på S:t Helena", which already used them — but it deals four cards into the cells and lets only kings fill empty columns, so only about 85% of deals win.

Timeline

From PLATO to Windows

"Free Cell" on PLATO

Alfille wrote the first FreeCell in the TUTOR language as a medical student at the University of Illinois, on the PLATO educational system. Most sources give 1978; freecell.net says "the mid-1970s". He built it to play without reshuffling real cards, and shared it because he wondered how many games were winnable. Players could pick 4 to 10 columns and 1 to 10 cells, and there were tournaments on hand-picked deals. Rankings went by winning streak, which was easier to store than a win percentage; Alfille recalled leaving room for only about 4,000 straight wins. FreeCell's streak culture starts here.

Jim Horne and Microsoft

Jim Horne learned the game on PLATO while working at the University of Alberta. He put a text-mode MS-DOS version on CompuServe as shareware, asking $10, then joined Microsoft in 1988 and wrote the Windows version. It first shipped on Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2: in 1991 according to Wikipedia and the program's own copyright line, in 1992 according to Michael Keller's FreeCell FAQ. The date in the file is the more direct evidence.

The install guide for Win32s, the 32-bit extension for Windows 3.1, said to run FreeCell to check the install had worked (Knowledge Base article Q106715), and FreeCell shipped with Windows NT, first released in 1993. Horne recalled in 2024 slipping it into the NT build to tease a game-hating boss, whose name sat in the About box until just before release — his own story, not documented elsewhere. Windows 95 made the little-known game famous, and it stayed in every Windows up to Windows 7.

32,000 numbers

Horne numbered the deals. Each number seeds the random number generator, so in the classic versions up to Windows 7 the same number gave the same deal on any computer and players could swap hard ones. He stopped at 32,000 because it was close to the largest positive number that fits in 15 bits (32,767). Windows 95 hid two deliberately unwinnable joke deals, −1 and −2 (Vista added −3 and −4, which play themselves); Windows XP (2001) raised the count to a million, keeping the first 32,000. From Windows 8 in 2012, FreeCell lived in the free Microsoft Solitaire Collection app.

Microsoft never consulted Alfille, and the game carried no credit for his work.

Solved by people, solved by computers

The Internet FreeCell Project and #11982

In August 1994 Dave Ring recruited volunteers on Usenet to solve all 32,000 deals by hand. More than 100 people took blocks of 100 consecutive deals, and by April 1995 every deal had been solved except #11982. It is often cited as an early example of internet crowdsourcing — a word coined about a decade later.

#11982 is the only one of the original 32,000 that can't be won with four free cells; with five, it can. Keller nominates #1941 as the hardest solvable deal of the 32,000, and says the one he's asked about most after #11982 is #617, often by players who don't know about supermoves.

Computers take over

Probably the first large computer study was Don Woods's in 1994: a million random deals. In 1995 he reported on Usenet that his program had solved all but 14, the source of the familiar "99.999% winnable". In 2018 Theodore Pringle and Shlomi Fish finished checking all of FreeCell Pro's roughly 8.6 billion deals and found 102,075 that can't be won with four cells — about one in 84,000. Eight of the first million Microsoft deals are among them.

On the theory side, Malte Helmert proved in 2003 that generalised FreeCell, with more cards per suit, is NP-complete. The ordinary 52-card game alone has 52!, about 8×10⁶⁷, possible deals.

Common myths

• "Every deal can be won." No. #11982 can't be, and neither can about one deal in 84,000. The old help file only said it was "believed (although not proven)".
• "Microsoft hand-picked solvable deals." Keller calls this a persistent urban legend. The deals come from random seeds; only the joke deals −1 to −4 were built on purpose.
• "Jim Horne invented it" and "it first appeared in Windows 95." Alfille created it, and before Windows 95 it had already shipped on Entertainment Pack 2 and in Windows NT.
• "Alfille got the idea from Gardner's column." Unconfirmed. Alfille said he remembered the game from a book he'd read as a child, and couldn't say which one.
• "All 15 deals he lost were unsolvable." Said of a 72-year-old on Reddit who won 50,046 of 50,061 games, and unsupported: at one impossible deal in 84,000, you'd expect about 0.6 in 50,000.

Competitions, records and community

Offline: no documented tournaments

We found no in-person FreeCell tournaments or championships, no clubs or governing body, and no Guinness World Records entry. FreeCell is played alone, so the only fair contest is giving everyone the same deal and comparing results — the principle behind duplicate bridge — and the internet does that better than any hall. For solitaire competitions in general, see Solitaire Competitions and Communities.

Online: freecell.net

The main venue is freecell.net, opened in 1996 and still run by Denny Cronin, who also learned the game on PLATO. There is no undo; deals get harder as your streak grows (up a level every 10 straight wins, fully random after 50); and players are ranked by streaks and an Elo rating. Tournaments run all day on a schedule of 15-minute slots; whoever solves the most of 8 to 48 random deals in the least time wins. Named events include the Sunday Masters and the Saturday USOpen. According to Keller's FAQ, the all-time streak record there is 20,994 wins by "Ki", the best current streak is 20,012 by "PudongPete", and more than 100 streaks have passed 1,000.

Cronin first called his version NetCELL, fearing Microsoft had a claim to the name "Freecell". In fact, he later wrote, Microsoft had never even talked to Alfille about rights to his game.

Online: Microsoft and speedrunning

Microsoft Solitaire Collection has a Daily Challenge for each game and Events with worldwide leaderboards. For Windows Solitaire's 25th anniversary in 2015, the challenges from an internal employee tournament, FreeCell among them, were released to the public that June. On speedrun.com the FreeCell leaderboard is split by Windows version; as of September 2026 the fastest run is 7 seconds, by RecPro on Windows 8/10/11 (2022) — a deal-dependent sprint, a different sport from solving hard deals.

As Horne expected, some people play the numbered deals in order. Keller counts almost two dozen who have played all 32,000, most winning every deal but #11982, and in 2002 The New York Times profiled an Atlanta executive who had reached No. 28,028 without moving on from any deal until she won it.

Competing on this site

Here, too, one number is one deal, and a solver played every number from #1 to #20,000 through before it opened. None was found unsolvable (the few it couldn't settle in time got a fresh layout), as you'd expect at one in 84,000. Our shuffle is our own, though, so a number here is not the same deal as in Microsoft FreeCell — our #11982 is perfectly solvable.

• Per-deal rankings — everyone who plays a number competes on fastest time and on fewest moves, separately. A record counts only once the server has replayed your moves.
• Keeping records — all you need is a name and a four-digit password.

Sources

1. FreeCell FAQ — Michael Keller, Solitaire Laboratory
2. Interview with Paul Alfille — Denny Cronin, freecell.net, 2000
3. About Freecell and NetCELL — freecell.net
4. A Successful Practical Joke: FreeCell — Hey, Good Game, 2024
5. Mathematical Games, June 1968 — Martin Gardner, Scientific American, 1968
6. Baker's Game — Wikipedia
7. Microsoft FreeCell — Wikipedia
8. Microsoft Entertainment Pack — Wikipedia
9. Microsoft Entertainment Pack Volumes 1–4 [unpacked] — Internet Archive
10. How to Troubleshoot Win32s Installation Problems (Q106715) — Microsoft Knowledge Base, MIT mirror
11. The Friendly Orange Glow — Brian Dear, Pantheon, 2017
12. Finding Freecell in Windows 8 — Andy Rathbone, 2013
13. Microsoft Solitaire Collection — Wikipedia
14. One Down, 31,999 to Go: Surrendering to a Solitary Obsession — Ellen Kaye, The New York Times, 2002
15. The Winnability of Klondike Solitaire and Many Other Patience Games — Charlie Blake, Ian P. Gent, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2026
16. The solvability statistics of the Freecell Pro 4-Freecells Deals — Shlomi Fish, 2016–2018
17. freecell-pro-impossible-deals — Theodore Pringle, Shlomi Fish, GitHub
18. Complexity results for standard benchmark domains in planning — Malte Helmert, Artificial Intelligence, 2003
19. Freecell.net · Freecell Tournaments — How to Play · Tournament Schedule — freecell.net
20. Celebrating Microsoft Solitaire — Windows Experience Blog, 2015
21. The 25th Anniversary Star Club Collection is now available within Microsoft Solitaire Collection — Windows Experience Blog, 2015
22. FreeCell — Speedrun.com
23. Duplicate bridge — Wikipedia

Keep reading — FreeCell Strategy Guide · Baker's Game: History, Records and Competitions · A History of Solitaire (Patience) · Solitaire Competitions and Communities