FreeCell Solitaire: Rules and Winning Tips

The rules, simply explained

All 52 cards are dealt face-up into 8 tableau columns — 7 cards in the first four columns, 6 in the rest. There are three other areas:

• 4 free cells (top left) — each holds exactly one card, temporarily. This is your spare hand.
• 4 foundations (top right) — built upward by suit, Ace to King. This is where cards go to win.
• 8 tableau columns — built downward in alternating colors (red on black, black on red), like Klondike.

Move cards between columns to uncover the ones you need, park blockers in free cells, and send cards to the foundations. Get all 52 cards onto the foundations and you win. That's the whole game — and here's the remarkable part: all but a handful of deals are winnable (about 99.999% of the classic 32,000 Microsoft deals have known solutions). When you lose FreeCell, it was a decision, not the deal.

Tip 1 — Free cells are precious: keep at least one open

Every free cell you fill is maneuvering room you've spent. A full set of free cells means you can't temporarily park anything — and many positions become unplayable. The discipline is simple:

• Use a free cell to unblock a specific card, then empty it again as soon as possible.
• Never park a card in a free cell "just because." If it has no job, it shouldn't be there.
• Before filling your last free cell, stop and check: is there another line of play that keeps one open?

Tip 2 — Learn the supermove (it changes everything)

You can move cards one at a time — but you can also move a whole sequence at once, as long as you have the spare capacity to have moved it card by card. The formula:

This is why empty columns are so powerful (see Tip 3) — each one doubles your moving capacity. When a long sequence won't move, count your capacity before assuming it's stuck.

Tip 3 — Empty columns are for Kings — then for everything

An empty tableau column can only be started with a King (or a King-led sequence). So the first job of an empty column is housing a King that unlocks the column beneath it. But its second job is bigger: it's a parking bay that doubles your supermove capacity and gives sequences somewhere to be reorganized.

Tip 4 — Don't rush cards to the foundation

It feels productive to send every card up the moment it can go. Resist it — for anything above a two. A 6♠ sitting in the tableau can hold a 5♥ and keep a sequence alive; a 6♠ on the foundation can hold nothing. Send Aces and twos up freely (they're rarely needed as building material), but keep low-to-mid cards in play until you're sure you won't need them to hold sequences.

Tip 5 — Plan in sequences, not single moves

Beginners move whatever can move. Winners think 3–4 moves ahead: if I move this 7♦ onto the 8♣, then the 6♠ is free, which uncovers the 5♥ I need for the 6♣… FreeCell rewards this because nothing is hidden — the entire puzzle is visible, so the entire solution is computable. Before committing to a line, trace it to the end.

Tip 6 — Undo to explore, not to escape

Because FreeCell is deterministic, undo is a legitimate analysis tool: try a line, see where it dead-ends, undo, try the alternative. The patterns you discover this way — which column to empty first, when to spend a free cell — become instincts that win future games outright.

Tip 7 — The opening matters more than you think

Scan the deal before your first move: where are the Aces? Which columns are shortest (candidates for emptying)? Which Kings are buried deepest? A 30-second survey routinely reveals the game's key bottleneck — and the best players attack the bottleneck first, not the most obvious move.