FreeCell Rules

FreeCell is the solitaire with nothing to hide. Every one of the 52 cards is dealt face up before your first move, which changes the character of the game completely: there is no luck to blame and no reveal to hope for, only a position to be solved. It is the closest thing the solitaire family has to a pure logic puzzle, and it rewards a very different mindset than Klondike or Spider. This page covers the complete rules; the strategy guide covers how to think, and the FreeCell page is where you play.

The setup

FreeCell uses one standard 52-card deck, dealt entirely face up into eight tableau columns, traditionally called cascades. The first four cascades receive seven cards each and the remaining four receive six — 52 cards on the table, nothing in reserve. There is no stock and no waste pile; every card you will ever get is visible from the first second.

Above the cascades sit eight special spaces: four free cells on the left and four foundations on the right. The free cells are the game's namesake — each can hold exactly one card of any rank, parked temporarily until you retrieve it. The foundations, as in Klondike, are the destination.

The objective

You win by moving all 52 cards to the foundations, each of which builds upward by suit from Ace to King. An Ace starts its foundation; every subsequent card must match the suit and be exactly one rank higher. Fill all four foundations and the game is won.

Legal moves

Within the cascades, building follows the familiar pattern: descending order, alternating colors. A red 6 goes on a black 7; a black Jack on a red Queen. From the top of any cascade, a card may move to another cascade (onto the next rank up of the opposite color), to an empty free cell, to an empty cascade, or to its foundation.

• Free cells hold one card each. A card in a cell can come back down to any legal cascade spot or go up to its foundation. Four cells means at most four parked cards at once — and a full set of cells is usually a game going wrong.
• Empty cascades accept anything. Unlike Klondike's Kings-only rule, any card or movable sequence may occupy an empty cascade. An empty cascade is strictly more flexible than a free cell, because it can hold a whole sequence and be built upon.
• The official rule: one card at a time. Traditional FreeCell has no multi-card moves at all. Everything else — the famous "supermove" — is built on this single-card foundation.

The supermove formula

Moving sequences one card at a time through free cells is legal but tedious, so every digital version automates it. The number of cards you can move as one unit is:

(empty free cells + 1) × 2^{empty cascades}

A worked example: suppose you want to move the sequence 8♥-7♠-6♦-5♣ onto a black 9, with two free cells open and one empty cascade. The formula gives (2 + 1) × 2¹ = 6 cards — the four-card move is allowed. The game executes it as singles behind the scenes: 5♣ and 6♦ to the free cells, 7♠ to the empty cascade, 8♥ onto the 9, then everything reassembled on top. With those same two cells but no empty cascade, the limit drops to (2 + 1) × 2⁰ = 3, and the four-card move is illegal — you would have to break the sequence up yourself.

Two consequences follow. First, supermoves are shortcuts, not rules: any supermove can be decomposed into legal single-card moves, and nothing more. Second, the formula is why strategy guides obsess over keeping cells and cascades open — each empty free cell adds to your capacity, and each empty cascade doubles it.

Winnability: the famous ~99%

Because all information is open, FreeCell is astonishingly fair: roughly 99% of deals are solvable. Losing a FreeCell game almost always means a better line existed — a bracing fact that Klondike and Spider players never have to face. There is no scoring tradition to speak of; the game is measured in wins, win streaks, and solved deal numbers.

Deal numbering and the Microsoft heritage

FreeCell reached the masses with Windows 95, and the implementation carried a quietly brilliant idea: every deal was generated from a number, #1 through #32,000, so any two players anywhere could play the identical layout. The community project that followed — the Internet FreeCell Project — set out to solve all 32,000 by hand and succeeded on every deal except #11982, later proven unsolvable by exhaustive search. Modern versions extend the numbering into the millions, but the originals remain a shared reference: #164 is a famously easy deal, #1941 a famously hard one, and "have you beaten 11982?" is a running joke a quarter-century old.

How FreeCell differs from its cousins

The deeper comparison — including where Spider fits between the two — is in our Klondike vs Spider vs FreeCell article. And if any term here is new — cascade, cell, foundation, supermove — the glossary defines them all. When the rules are comfortable, the FreeCell strategy guide teaches the planning habits that turn a 99%-solvable game into a 99% win rate.

Frequently asked questions