How to Play FreeCell
FreeCell is the solitaire for people who dislike luck. Every card is face-up from the start, so there is nothing hidden and nothing to guess. Whether you win is almost entirely a question of whether you planned far enough ahead.
Of the 32,000 numbered Microsoft deals, all but one — the famously impossible #11982 — are winnable. That property is what makes FreeCell worth learning: when you lose, you made a mistake, and you can find it.
The board
Eight columns hold all 52 cards, dealt face-up. Four columns get seven cards, four get six.
Four free cells sit at the top left. Each holds exactly one card, of any rank or suit. Think of them as your hands — temporary space, not storage.
Four foundations sit at the top right, one per suit.
Because nothing is face-down, the entire game state is visible on turn one. All the information is there; the difficulty is entirely in the search.
The rules
Foundations build up, in suit, from the Ace, exactly as in Klondike.
Columns build down in alternating colours. A red nine goes on a black ten.
Any card may start an empty column. Not just a King — this is a significant difference from Klondike, and it makes empty columns far more valuable here.
A free cell holds one card and gives it back on demand. You can move a card from a cell to a column or a foundation whenever the destination is legal.
The supermove rule
This is the rule that confuses most newcomers, and the one the interface here shows you continuously.
Strictly, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. When you drag a sequence of five cards to another column, what really happens is a series of single moves through the free cells and any empty columns. So the number of cards you can move at once is not a free choice — it is a consequence of how much scratch space you have:
cards you can move = (1 + free cells) × 2^(empty columns)
With four empty cells and no empty columns, you can move five cards. Fill one cell and it drops to four. Open one column and it doubles to ten.
One catch worth internalising: if the destination is itself an empty column, that column cannot also serve as scratch space, so the capacity is halved for that move. Moving into your last empty column is weaker than it looks.
The Can move counter at the top of the board is this number, live. Watch it change as you fill cells — it turns an abstract formula into something you can feel.
Strategy
Free cells are hands, not pockets
The single most common way to lose FreeCell is filling all four cells with cards you have no plan to place. Every occupied cell shrinks your movement capacity — from five, to four, to three — and a board with zero free cells and no empty column can only move one card at a time, which is usually death.
Before parking a card in a cell, know what you intend to do with it and roughly when.
Get an empty column early, and defend it
Empty columns are worth more than free cells: each one doubles capacity where a cell only adds one. Early on, the shortest column is your best target — clear it and your options multiply.
Having emptied one, resist filling it with the first King that comes along. An empty column with nothing in it is a movement multiplier; the same column with a King in it is a place to build. Both are useful, but they are not the same resource, and you cannot have both.
Dig for Aces, but not blindly
Aces buried at the bottom of a column are the usual bottleneck. Getting them out early is almost always right. But count the moves it will take first — spending three free cells to extract one Ace can leave you unable to do anything afterwards.
Do not rush cards to the foundations
Unlike Klondike, where banking is mostly safe, FreeCell often needs mid-rank cards left in play. A five you sent up is a five that cannot hold a four. Send cards up when they are no longer useful as building material, not the moment they become legal.
A safe habit: bank a card once both opposite-colour cards one rank below it are already banked. At that point nothing needs it any more.
Plan the whole sequence before you start it
Because everything is visible, FreeCell rewards looking several moves ahead in a way that hidden-information games cannot. Before you begin a manoeuvre, trace it to the end. If you cannot see where the last card lands, you are guessing — and in a game with no hidden cards, guessing is the only way to lose.
Undo is a learning tool
The deals here are seeded, so Replay deal gives you the identical layout again. Losing a deal and immediately replaying it — knowing where the trouble was — is the fastest way to build the planning habit the game actually rewards.
Common questions
Are all deals winnable? Nearly. In the standard numbered set, exactly one of 32,000 is provably impossible. Random deals are winnable at a similarly high rate, so if you are stuck, the fault is usually recoverable.
Why can I not move this run? Almost always the supermove limit. Check the Can move counter — you may need to empty a cell or a column first.
Can I take a card back off a foundation? Not in FreeCell. Once banked, it stays, which is exactly why premature banking is punished.
Does an empty column really double my capacity? Yes — and two empty columns quadruple it. That exponent is why experienced players prioritise columns over cells.
Last updated 2026-08-22