FreeCell rules

Setup & the deal

The shuffled deck is dealt round-robin into eight cascades: one card to each column in turn until the deck is gone. Columns one to four end up with seven cards, columns five to eight with six. Every card is dealt face up — FreeCell has no hidden information, no stock and no waste.

Above the cascades sit four empty free cells, each able to hold exactly one card, and four foundation slots, one per suit (♠ ♥ ♦ ♣). Restart replays the identical deal.

Because nothing is hidden, FreeCell is a perfect-information game — every deal can be fully analysed before your first move, which is why nearly every deal is winnable and why losses are planning errors rather than bad luck.

How to move cards

• Cascade building — a card lands on a cascade card exactly one rank higher and of the opposite color: a red 5 on a black 6.
• Free cells — any single top card may be parked in an empty free cell, and a cell card may return to any legal cascade spot, go to a foundation, or start an empty column. One card per cell, no exceptions.
• Empty cascades — accept any card or any legal run, not just Kings. This is a major difference from Klondike and the engine of most winning lines.
• Foundations — build up in suit from the Ace, one single card at a time. Tap or double-click a playable card to send it home.
• Runs — a group of cards moves together only if it is already a legal sequence (descending, alternating colors) and small enough for the supermove limit below. You may split a run anywhere.

A worked example: the 7♥ may land on the 8♠ or the 8♣ — either black eight. To dig out an Ace buried under two loose cards, park one in a free cell and drop the other on a legal cascade spot (or a second cell): two moves, one Ace. Every move works by drag-and-drop or by tapping; a tap sends a card to its foundation when that is legal.

The supermove: how many cards move at once

Officially FreeCell moves one card at a time — multi-card moves are shorthand for shuttling cards through free cells and empty columns. The game does the math for you and allows a run of up to:

empty free cells + empty cascades + 1 cards in a single move.

The formula is additive, matching cardgames.io: with 3 free cells and 4 empty columns you may move an 8-card run (3 + 4 + 1). Many other FreeCell implementations use a multiplicative formula — (cells + 1) × 2^empties — which would allow far larger moves; ours deliberately does not.

The shorthand is real: to move 4♣-3♦-2♣ onto a red 5 with two empty cells, the game is effectively parking the 2♣ and 3♦ in the cells, moving the 4♣, then unpacking them on top — which is exactly why the capacity is cells plus empties plus one. The limit is checked against the board at the moment you move: the same run can be movable one turn and too big the next, after a cell fills up.

Worked capacity examples: with all four cells free and no empty columns you may move 5 cards (4 + 0 + 1). Fill two cells and it drops to 3. Empty one column and it climbs back to 5 — or stays at 4 if the empty column is your destination. Learning to read the current capacity at a glance is half of FreeCell.

Winning & auto-finish

You win when all four foundations hold 13 cards. Since everything is visible from the deal, almost every game is winnable with correct play — losses are planning errors, not bad luck.

Auto-finish appears once the endgame is trivial: every cascade is ordered with ranks never increasing from bottom to top (each card is equal to or lower than the one beneath it). From such a position, repeatedly playing tops to the foundations always wins — cards parked in free cells included — so the game offers to do it for you, lowest ranks first.

FreeCell never declares a forced loss: a dead position is simply one where no useful move remains, and unlimited undo means you can always back out of a bad line and try another. With the same deal replayable via Restart, a lost FreeCell game is really an unsolved puzzle waiting for a second attempt.

Edge cases & fine print

• A foundation’s top card may come back to the tableau — and even into an empty free cell — whenever that helps. Only foundation-to-foundation moves are forbidden.
• A run must be internally valid to be picked up at all: you cannot grab an out-of-sequence group even if its bottom card fits the destination.
• The supermove only counts free cells and empty cascades — foundations never serve as waypoints, and a full cell contributes nothing.
• A supermove registers as a single move on the counter, even though it stands in for many one-card moves.
• Foundations build strictly in suit — the 2♥ only ever lands on the A♥ — and each suit has its own fixed slot; there is no choosing which foundation a suit uses.
• There is no stock, no redeals and no scoring — the game tracks moves and time only.
• The auto-finish trigger does not require alternating colors in the cascades — only non-increasing ranks. A 9-9-5 stack qualifies.
• Undo is unlimited; Restart replays the identical deal, which makes FreeCell ideal for retrying a botched line.

Variants

We play standard four-cell, eight-cascade FreeCell with the additive supermove — the same rules as cardgames.io. There are no difficulty settings because the deal itself is the puzzle.

Well-known variants we do not play: FreeCell with two or three cells (brutally hard), Baker’s Game — identical except cascades build down in suit rather than alternating colors — and Seahaven Towers (ten columns, Kings-only empty columns). If you want FreeCell’s open information with a different flavour of planning, Addiction lays the whole deck face up too.

FreeCell’s modern rules were fixed by the Microsoft version that shipped with Windows, whose 32,000 numbered deals were famously attacked by volunteers until only deal #11982 stood unsolved. Random deals like ours are winnable more than 99% of the time — the rules above are the complete toolkit; the rest is reading the board.

Frequently asked questions

Related rulebooks

• Solitaire rules — the classic klondike patience game
• Spider rules — two decks, eight runs — 1, 2 or 4 suits
• Addiction rules — fill the gaps, sort the rows — 3 shuffles
• Yukon rules — no stock, move any group — dig them out