FreeCell Solitaire - Card Game | Play Online for Free
Play FreeCell Solitaire online for free! Learn the rules, understand Supermoves, and master the strategy of this classic 52-card game where almost every deal is solvable. Start playing now!
FreeCell Solitaire: Play the Classic Card Game Online for Free
FreeCell is a highly engaging and popular solitaire card game played with a standard 52-card deck. What sets FreeCell apart from many traditional solitaire variants is its core difference in solvability: very few deals are truly unsolvable, making it a game of skill and strategy rather than pure luck. Another key feature is that all cards are dealt face-up from the very beginning of the game, providing the player with complete information about the layout.
Rules and Setup of FreeCell
The game utilizes one standard 52-card deck. The setup involves three distinct areas: the cascades, the foundations, and the cells.
- Open Cells (Free Cells): There are four open cells (or free cells) located typically in the upper-left corner of the layout. These are temporary storage locations, and each can hold only one card at a time.
- Foundations: There are four open foundations located typically in the upper-right corner. This is where the goal of the game is achieved.
- Cascades (Tableaus): Cards are dealt face-up into eight cascades.
- Four of these cascades comprise seven cards each.
- The other four cascades comprise six cards each.
Gameplay Mechanics: Building and Moving Cards
The primary goal is to move all 52 cards to the four foundation piles. The game is won once all foundations are built up completely from Ace to King.
- Tableau Building: The tableaus (cascades) must be built downward by alternating colors (e.g., a Black 8 can only be placed on a Red 9). The top card of each cascade is the one available to begin a sequence or be moved.
- Foundation Building: The foundations are built upward by suit (e.g., Heart 2 on Heart Ace). They start with the Ace and are built up sequentially to the King (Ace, 2, 3, ..., King).
- Legal Moves: A move can involve any of the following:
- Moving a cell card to a tableau, an empty cell, an empty cascade, or its foundation.
- Moving the top card of any cascade to a tableau, an empty cell, an empty cascade, or its foundation.
Supermoves and Card Movement
In the traditional, strictest interpretation of FreeCell, only one card may be moved at a time. However, players often move sequences of cards, which is possible due to the Supermove concept.
A supermove is a shortcut that represents a sequence of individual, legal one-card moves that use the available empty cells and empty cascades as intermediate storage locations. Although a player using a physical deck or a modern computer implementation may move a complete or partial tableau at once, it is only valid if a series of legal one-card moves could have achieved the same result.
Example of a Supermove (using one empty cell):
- Move the top card of Tableau A to the free cell.
- Move the second card from the top of Tableau A (which is now the top card) onto another Tableau B.
- Move the original top card from the free cell on top of the card just moved onto Tableau B.
The maximum length of a sequential run (supermove) that can be moved at once is determined by the number of empty cells ($N_c$) and empty cascades ($N_e$), and can be calculated as $2^{N_c} \times (N_e + 1)$.
Levels of Difficulty
While the classic FreeCell game is based on specific deal numbers, many modern computer implementations offer varying difficulty levels:
- Easy
- Normal
- Hard
Unsolvable Deals and Solvability Rate
A defining characteristic of FreeCell is its remarkably high solvability rate. It is estimated that approximately 99.999% of all possible deals are solvable.
- Historically, the original "Microsoft 32,000" deals included with the Windows version of FreeCell had only one known unsolvable deal: Deal number 11982.
- More recent and extensive analysis of $8.6$ billion FreeCell Pro deals by Theodore Pringle and Shlomi Fish found that $102,075$ of these deals were impossible to solve, equating to roughly one impossible deal out of every 84,000 random deals.
