FreeCell

The table, and how you win

One standard 52-card deck, dealt one card at a time across 8 columns from left to right — so the first 4 columns hold 7 cards each and the last 4 hold 6. Every card is face up. There is no stock to draw from and nothing to turn over: it is the only card game here that never puts a card face down.

Above the columns sit 4 free cells and the 4 foundations, 8 slots on the same grid as the 8 columns below. You win when all 4 foundations are built from ace to king, one suit each.

• Columns: the 8 piles you work in. You can move the exposed card at the bottom of a column, or a run of cards ending there if they are already in order.
• Free cells: 4 slots, each holding exactly 1 card. A card parked there comes back out onto a column or onto its foundation.
• Foundations: 4 piles, one per suit, built upwards from the ace.
• A dealt column is not a tidy sequence. The shuffle drops cards straight into the columns, so the order inside one is arbitrary — only the bottom end of a column can happen to be a run.

Klondike deals cards face down and keeps a stock in reserve. FreeCell has neither, so everything that decides this deal is in front of you on move 1. That difference is the reason the two games offer different kinds of help.

Controls, and where a card may go

Tap a card to pick it up, then tap where it goes. While you are holding a card, every place it may legally land lights up — the rules are shown rather than memorised. There is no drag and drop.

Tap a card you are already holding and it goes to its foundation, if it can. Tap somewhere it cannot go and nothing scolds you: the selection moves to whatever movable card is there, or it simply clears. No error sound, no buzz.

• Onto a column: one rank lower and the opposite colour. A black 8 takes a red 7, that red 7 takes a black 6, and so on.
• Onto an empty column: any card at all. Klondike allows only a king there. Here an empty column is the most valuable thing on the table, for the reason in the next section.
• Into a free cell: 1 card, and it goes into the cell you tapped. The 4 cells are interchangeable to the rules, but not to the person who just tapped one of them.
• Onto a foundation: the same suit, one rank higher, starting from the ace.
• Cards never come back off a foundation. That is the classic rule and it is kept on purpose — Klondike here does let you take one back. Undo is what recovers a card you sent up too early.

Moving more than one card at once

A run of cards already in order — descending, colours alternating — travels as one. Tap the topmost card of the run and the rest comes with it, and however many cards it carries, that is 1 move.

How many you can carry is not a fixed number. It is exactly the number you could have carried by hand, one card at a time, through the cells and columns standing empty: (1 + empty cells) × 2^(empty columns). Moving a run is shorthand for that shuffling, never a power beyond it.

One catch surprises almost everyone: an empty column you are moving into does not count towards the doubling. The doubling comes from parking half a run in an empty column and picking it back up, and a column that this move is about to fill cannot also be the staging area. With all 4 cells empty and 1 empty column, you can carry 10 cards onto a card — but only 5 into that empty column itself.

That number is never printed on screen. Pick up a run longer than you can carry and nothing lights up anywhere — the absence is the rule answering you. Empty a cell, or clear a column, and the same run suddenly has somewhere to go.

Dead ends, Undo, and why there is no Hint

FreeCell can be played into a dead end. Fill all 4 cells with cards that fit nowhere and the board stops with cards still on the table — there is no stock to turn, so nothing will loosen it. The game says so once, quietly, beside the board: No moves left. Every cell is full and nothing fits. Undo a move, or take a new deal. It does not throw a warning over your game and it does not end anything.

Undo is unlimited and free. No game feature here is ever behind an ad or a purchase.

• Undo steps back one move and rewinds the move count with it, because that count describes the board you are looking at. A run you carried as one move comes back as one move.
• Finish the game appears when moves to the foundations alone can carry the rest home. It is a button, not an autopilot: nothing is ever sent up for you mid-game, because choosing when to send a card up is part of playing. The cards it moves are added to your move count, because they moved.
• Retry same board deals the identical cards again, and New deal gives you a fresh one. Both are free, and neither is rationed.
• Undo history is not carried across an interruption. Your board, its seed, your move count and your elapsed time are saved when you leave; the steps you could have taken back are not.
• There is no Hint, and that is deliberate. All 52 cards are visible, so there is no hidden thing a hint could reveal — pointing at the next move would simply be solving the puzzle in your place. Solitaire and Spider do have hints, because they really do keep information off the table.

Sliding Puzzle and 2048 have no Hint for the same reason. Matching the feature lists across games would mean handing over the answer in exactly the games where finding the answer is the whole activity.

Deals, the Daily Challenge, and the numbers

Every deal is generated on your device from a seed, and the same seed is always the same 52 cards in the same places. That is what makes a retry exactly the deal you just lost. Nothing is downloaded and no content server is involved.

Deals are not screened for winnability. Nearly every random FreeCell deal is winnable in principle, but "nearly" is the honest word: no solver runs here and no guarantee is made, so a deal that cannot be won can come up. Minesweeper’s promise of a board solvable without guessing is a different kind of claim — that one can be built into the board rather than tested for afterwards.

• The Daily Challenge is 1 deal a day, the same for every player, taken from your device’s local date. No server time and no connection are involved.
• The last 30 days stay open, with no condition attached. You never have to clear one day to reach another.
• No streak is counted or shown. What is recorded is which days you won, not how many in a row, so a missed day costs nothing.
• Your move count is shown while you play. No clock is shown; your time is recorded quietly and appears on the finish screen and in your statistics.
• There is no score — no Windows-style points, no Vegas scoring, nothing that pays you for speed. Moves and time are the only two numbers, and neither hurries you.
• Free deals and the daily deal are kept in separate slots, so leaving one half-played to try the other loses neither.

Your win rate is shown next to the deals you played and the games you won, and it stays next to them. Deals are not filtered for winnability and a dead end is always possible, so that percentage is not a pure measure of skill — the two numbers it came from say more than it does.

Tips

• Empty a column early. An empty column accepts any card and doubles the run you can move elsewhere, which makes it worth more than an empty cell. The 4 columns on the right start with 6 cards instead of 7, so that is where the first one usually comes from.
• Keep cells free. Capacity is counted from the cells still empty, not from the 4 you started with, so every parked card shortens every run you can move afterwards. A card sitting in a cell with no way back out is how most dead ends begin.
• Dig the aces out early. Nothing can ever be placed on an ace — no rank is lower — so an ace at the end of a column blocks it, and an empty foundation will take nothing else. Everything piled on top of a buried ace has to move sooner or later anyway.
• Do not send every card up. A black 5 on its foundation can no longer catch a red 4 still buried in the columns, and foundations never give cards back — a card sent up too early is gone for the rest of the deal.
• Plan the whole sequence before you touch anything. With all 52 cards visible you can count a manoeuvre out in full before you start it, which is the one thing this game gives you that a game with face-down cards cannot.
• When it goes wrong, use Undo. Stepping back as far as you like costs nothing, and it is usually cheaper than fighting a position you have already broken.

Questions people ask