How to play FreeCell

Rules in short: all 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns. Build four foundations by suit from ace to king. Move cards between columns in descending order and alternating colors, and use four free cells to hold one card each while you dig.

Setup Moves Moving several cards Strategy Coach review FAQ

Setup

Shuffle one deck and deal it face up, left to right, into eight columns. The first four columns get seven cards and the last four get six. Above the columns are four empty free cells on the left and four empty foundations on the right.

Legal moves

• Top card to a column. Put it on a card one rank higher of the opposite color: a red 6 on a black 7.
• Any card to an empty column. Unlike Klondike, it does not have to be a king.
• Top card to a free cell. Each cell holds one card, which can later go to a column or a foundation.
• Build the foundations. Ace first, then 2, 3 and so on up to the king, one pile per suit.

On Snug Table, cards that are safe to play go to the foundations by themselves: aces and twos always, and higher cards once both lower cards of the other color are already home, so you never need them in the columns again. Tap any card to send it to its best spot, or drag it.

Moving several cards at once

Officially you move one card at a time, but an ordered run can move together as long as you could have moved it card by card through the free cells and empty columns. The limit is:

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

When you move a run into an empty column, that column does not count in the formula.

FreeCell strategy for beginners

• Plan before the first move. Every card is visible. Find the aces and twos and work out how to free them.
• Keep free cells open. A full set of free cells is the most common way to lose. Use a cell only when it frees something useful.
• Empty columns are worth more than cells. Each one doubles how many cards you can move at once. Do not fill one with a low card you could have put in a cell.
• Build long runs. A tidy column of alternating colors moves as one piece later.
• Do not rush cards home. A low card on a foundation can no longer hold a card in the columns. The game already sends home only the cards that are safe.

Can every FreeCell deal be won?

Almost. FreeCell is famous because nearly every deal can be solved with careful play. When we built the winnable list, our solver found a win within about a second for 2,000 of the 2,072 random deals it checked (96.5%); the rest are hard, not necessarily impossible. If you pick Winnable deal, you only get deals the solver has already won, so the hint and the coach always answer quickly.

The coach review

When you run out of moves, or the hint finds no way to win, tap Coach review. The coach replays your game with the solver, finds the last move at which the deal could still be won, tells you which move closed the last winning line and what would have kept it open, and can take you straight back there. After a win it points out moments when all four free cells were full or an empty column was filled with a small card.

Deal numbers and the daily deal

Every shuffle has a number. The card order comes from a fixed formula: the seed is the SHA-256 hash of snugtable-freecell| followed by the deal number, shuffled with the same provably fair method as our Spades and Okey deals. Our numbers are our own and do not match the numbered deals of other FreeCell programs. Send a friend the deal number and they get exactly your game. The daily deal is a winnable deal, the same for everyone that day.