How to Play FreeCell
Learn FreeCell from scratch: eight columns dealt face up, four cells, and the rule that decides how many cards you can move at once.
Rules checked against the engine that runs the board on .
Play FreeCell now Free, in this tab, no sign-up How to play FreeCell, step by step
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Look at the table
FreeCell is played with one 52-card pack, and every single card is dealt face up at the start, so there is nothing hidden and nothing to turn over. The eight columns in the middle are the tableau: four of them hold seven cards and four hold six. The four small spaces at the top left are the free cells, and the four at the top right are the foundations. There is no stock and no pile of cards waiting to be dealt.
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Know what winning looks like
You win FreeCell by moving all fifty-two cards onto the four foundations. Each foundation holds one suit and is built upwards from the Ace: Ace, 2, 3 and so on to Queen and King, all in the same suit. An empty foundation accepts nothing but an Ace. Because every card is visible from the first second, whether a deal can be won is a question of finding the right order, not of luck in the draw.
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Play any Ace you can reach
Only the bottom card of a column can be moved, so look along the bottom of the eight columns for an Ace and send it to an empty foundation space. Drag it, or tap the card and then tap the foundation, or double-click it and it will find its own way. That is your first completed move. Aces and twos are almost always worth playing early, because nothing can ever be built on them in the tableau.
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Build the columns downward in alternating colours
Inside the tableau, a card may be placed on the bottom card of another column only if it is one rank lower and the opposite colour: a red six onto a black seven, a black jack onto a red queen. This is the same building rule as Klondike solitaire. Every move you make in the columns is about digging a particular card out from under the cards covering it, because there is no stock to bring you new options.
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Park a card in a free cell — but count first
Each of the four cells at the top left holds exactly one card, of any rank or suit, and a card in a cell can be played back out to a column or to a foundation whenever it fits. A cell is a parking space, not a bin: a card put there occupies it until somewhere else will take it. Filling all four cells with nothing lined up to empty them is how most lost deals are lost.
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Understand why long moves are sometimes refused
FreeCell lets you drag several cards at once, but moving several cards is really several single-card moves that use the free cells and empty columns as workspace. The most you can shift in one go is the number of empty cells plus one, doubled for every empty column — four free cells and no empty column allows five cards. If a move you expected to work is refused, empty a cell or a column and try it again.
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Use empty columns, and know what they are worth
Any card may be moved into an empty column in FreeCell, not just a King, which makes emptying a column both a parking space and a multiplier on how many cards you can move at once. That is why the usual advice is to empty a column before you fill a cell: a cell taken costs you one card of reach, while a column emptied doubles it. Clearing the shortest column is not always cheapest — work out which one actually unblocks something.
Play FreeCell That is enough to start. The rest of this page is the reference.
The rules in full
Everything the FreeCell lesson above skipped: the edge cases, what happens when you run out of moves, how the game ends and how it is scored. 8 sections, written to be looked things up in rather than read straight through — the contents at the top of the page jump to any of them.
The words on the table
- Tableau
- The eight columns in the middle of the table. All fifty-two cards start here, face up.
- Column
- One of those eight piles. Only the card at the bottom of a column is free to move.
- Free cell
- One of the four spaces at the top left. Each holds exactly one card of any kind, and gives it back whenever you have somewhere to put it.
- Foundation
- One of the four spaces at the top right, built up from Ace to King in a single suit. All four filled is the win.
- Build
- To place a card on another card legally. You build down in alternating colours in the tableau, and up in suit on the foundations.
- Run
- Cards already in descending, alternating-colour order at the bottom of a column. A run can be dragged as one piece, up to the limit explained below.
- Void
- A column with no cards in it. In FreeCell a void takes any card — and it is worth more than a cell.
The deal
One pack, fifty-two cards, no jokers, dealt across eight columns until the pack is gone. That does not divide evenly, so the first four columns get seven cards and the last four get six. Every card is face up from the start. The four cells and the four foundations begin empty.
Nothing is hidden and nothing is held back, which is the whole idea of FreeCell: the information you need to win is on the table before you make your first move.
Every legal move
- A card onto a foundation. An empty foundation takes an Ace; after that, the next rank up in the same suit.
- A card onto another column. Legal only if the card is one rank lower than the card it lands on and the opposite colour.
- A card into an empty cell. Any single card from the bottom of a column, or the card at the bottom of a column onto a cell. One card per cell.
- A card out of a cell, onto a column that will take it or onto a foundation.
- A card into an empty column. Any card at all, or any movable run.
- A run onto another column, within the limit below.
- A card back off a foundation into the tableau, if it fits there. It is legal, occasionally useful, and it costs 15 points.
The move limit, in full
This is the rule that confuses everybody the first time a drag is refused.
A “multi-card move” is not really a rule of the game at all — it is a shortcut. Moving five cards means moving four of them into cells and empty columns one at a time, moving the fifth, and then putting the four back on top of it. The program does it in one gesture, but it can only do it if the workspace is actually there. So:
Cards you can move at once = (empty cells + 1) × 2 to the power of the number of empty columns.
With four cells free and nothing else, that is five cards. Fill one cell and it drops to four. Empty a column and five becomes ten. One detail catches people out: if you are moving cards into an empty column, that column cannot also be used as workspace, so it does not count in the doubling.
How a game ends
You win when all fifty-two cards are on the foundations. Once every cell is empty, every remaining card can simply be run up in order — nothing can go wrong from there — so a Finish button appears and plays the rest out for you.
There is no formal loss in FreeCell. A deal is lost when there is no move left that leads anywhere, which is a judgement rather than a rule, and it is exactly when undo earns its keep. Hint lights the best move it can find right now, which is also the quickest way to see whether a position really is dead.
How the score works
The number under the board is the standard solitaire scoring table: 10 points for each card that reaches a foundation, and minus 15 for a card taken back off one. With no stock and nothing face down, those are the only two entries that can ever apply, so the score tracks how much of the pack you have got home. It never drops below zero. The clock beside it is a plain timer, and three records are kept for each cell count — best score, fastest win and fewest moves — with the time and the move count filed only for a game you won.
Where this game makes a choice
- Four cells is the standard game, and the three- and two-cell settings are the standard way of making it harder. Each keeps its own record.
- Any card opens an empty column, as in the standard rules.
- Multi-card moves are allowed, capped by the formula above. Some implementations make you move every card by hand; the cap is what keeps that honest while letting you drag.
- Deals are not vetted. Our Klondike can be set to deal only boards a solver has already won. FreeCell has no such setting, so what you get is a shuffle, and we make no claim about how many of them are winnable.
- Foundation to tableau is allowed, at the standard 15-point cost, rather than locking a card away forever.
- The cards can be made larger — four sizes up to extra large for big print — and the table surface changed, green felt included.
Where these rules come from
The rules here follow the standard game as recorded on
Pagat, John McLeod’s card-game rules archive, and every
one was checked against the code that runs the board: the cells, the
alternating-colour build and the move limit live in our solitaire engine’s
rules.ts and game.ts, where the limit is written as
(freeCells + 1) × 2 ^ emptyColumns and applied to every drag. If a rule on this
page is not the rule the game plays by, tell us — corrections get a
test written for them.