FreeCell

• Work out how many cards you can carry before you start dragging. You can move one card, plus one more for every free cell that is empty: four cells empty means five cards, two cells full means three. Try to drag more and the cards will not lift at all, which is the game telling you the move is impossible.
• In this version an empty column does not raise that number — only free cells do. Many other FreeCell programs double your carrying capacity for each empty column, so if you have played elsewhere, expect to move fewer cards here.
• Before you touch anything, find the four aces and count how many cards sit on top of each. That count tells you how hard the deal is and which column is worth attacking first.
• Empty a whole column early, using one of the four right-hand columns, which start with six cards rather than seven. An empty column takes any card, so it is a parking space you can use again and again, while a filled cell stays blocked until you find somewhere for that one card.
• Never drop a card into a free cell without knowing what will let it out again. A cell holding a card with nowhere to go is lost for the rest of the game, and every cell you lose cuts how many cards you can carry.
• Send aces and twos up the moment you can, but think twice about the middle cards. A card on a foundation here is locked and cannot come back down, so a red five sent up early can no longer catch the black four you were relying on it for.
• Build the columns downwards in alternating colours: a black seven takes a red six, which takes a black five. Move runs like that whole rather than breaking them apart, because rebuilding one costs the cells you would rather keep empty.
• Dig kings out last. A king has nowhere to go except an empty column, so a king near the bottom of a pile is the hardest card on the board to shift.

This FreeCell is drag-and-drop, and only drag-and-drop. You press the button down on a card, keep it down while you move, and let go over the target. If a tremor, a stiff hand or a trackpad makes that difficult, this game will fight you, and we would rather say so than talk you into it. Our own Solitaire and Pyramid work the other way round: one click picks a card up, a second puts it down, with nothing to hold.

The cards are drawn about 90 pixels wide by 126 tall at full width, with the rank in opposite corners. The game measures the space it is given and swaps to smaller cards when that space is narrower, so browser zoom gives back less than you expect — the picture grows, then the game answers with a smaller card. A wider window helps more than zoom. The Text size button on this page changes the writing around the game, not the cards inside it. Finger drags do work on a tablet, but they are still drags.

There is no clock, no score and nothing counting down, so a hand can sit half-finished while you make tea. Sounds are on when you arrive. Open MENU, then Options, and clear the Play Sounds box to switch them off. The same panel offers a plain table background instead of the patterned one, which gives the white cards a quieter surround. Nothing on this page pops up over the cards while you play.

FreeCell as a computer game was written by Paul Alfille in 1978. He was a medical student at the University of Illinois, and he wrote it in a language called TUTOR for PLATO, an early system built for teaching. He took an older solitaire called Baker’s Game and changed one rule: instead of building the columns down in the same suit, cards build down in alternating colours. That single change is what turned a rigid patience into the game people still play, because alternating colours give you far more legal moves to weigh up.

It reached everyone else through Jim Horne, who played it on the PLATO system at the University of Alberta. In 1988 he published a ten-dollar shareware version for MS-DOS, joined Microsoft the same year, and later brought the game to Windows. It first shipped in Microsoft Entertainment Pack Volume 2, and has been included with every release of Windows since 1995, which is why many people met it on an office computer rather than at a card table. That version numbered its deals, and players worked through the whole set of thirty-two thousand. All but one have been solved. Deal number 11982 is the exception, and it cannot be won.

This is a self-hosted, open-source version of FreeCell (source), used under its MIT licence and hosted here so it loads fast and shows no third-party adverts inside the game. Browse all of our free games.