FreeCell

Nearly every deal can be won

FreeCell is the thinking player's solitaire. Because all 52 cards are dealt face-up from the start, there's no luck hiding behind a face-down pile: everything you need to know is right there on the table. Famously, of the first 32,000 numbered Microsoft deals only one, number 11,982, has no solution at all. So when you lose, it almost always means the answer was in front of you and you didn't find it.

The four free cells are temporary parking spaces, and they're your scarcest resource. Here's the detail most beginners miss: how many cards you can move as a block depends on how many free cells and empty columns you've kept open. With all four cells free you can shift five cards at once; fill them all and you're reduced to moving one card at a time. Guard that flexibility.

The supermove arithmetic

Moving a run of cards in one go is really a stack of single moves the game performs for you (players call it a supermove), and its size follows a formula worth memorising: empty free cells plus one, doubled for every empty column. Two free cells and no empty columns move three cards; the same two cells with one empty column move six; all four cells and two columns move twenty. One caveat: a column you're moving a run into doesn't count toward its own multiplier, since it can't act as a way-station for itself. This arithmetic should change how you price the board. An empty column isn't merely a parking spot, it's a doubler, which is why good players will happily spend four moves excavating one before touching anything else. It cuts the other way as well: every card left sitting in a free cell shrinks all your future transfers, so junk parked in a cell is quietly taxing every move you make.

How to plan a solve

• Before touching a card, hunt down the Aces and Twos and work out how you'll dig them free.
• Keep at least one or two free cells empty whenever you can: cramming all four full leaves you unable to manoeuvre.
• An empty column is worth even more than a free cell, so work toward clearing a whole column early.
• Don't rush cards to the foundations; you often need a middling card to bridge two sequences later on.

Habits that lose winnable games

The greedy foundation is the classic one. Sending every eligible card home feels like progress, but a card on the foundation is out of the workspace, and you'll want that red 5 back the moment a black 4 needs somewhere to sit. The reliable rule of thumb: a card is safe to send up once both cards of the opposite colour one rank below it are already home. The black 4s can go up when both red 3s are banked, because no red 3 will ever need a black 4 again. Second habit: using free cells as a dumping ground. A cell should hold a card with a scheduled exit (you know what it's waiting for and when it comes back down), not a card you got tired of looking at. Third: playing the first pleasant-looking move. Strong players read all eight columns before moving anything, find the deal's problem spot (typically an ace or two buried under high cards in the same column) and shape the first ten moves around freeing it. FreeCell punishes improvisation precisely because it rewards planning; when nearly every deal is winnable, every loss is a plan that never got made.

From a teaching mainframe to Windows

FreeCell was programmed in 1978 by Paul Alfille for PLATO, an early educational mainframe system, as a twist on a much older solitaire called Baker's Game, a game Martin Gardner had described in Scientific American a decade before. Alfille's single rule change, building tableau runs in alternating colours instead of in suit, is what turned a stubborn game into a nearly-always-winnable one. Microsoft's Jim Horne later brought it to Windows, where the numbered deals became a shared obsession: in 1994 the Internet FreeCell Project parcelled all 32,000 original deals out to volunteers, who between them solved every hand except the one mentioned at the top of this guide. Solvers have hammered at deal 11,982 ever since, and it still has no solution. That's the quiet appeal of the game: it's fair. When you lose, it wasn't the shuffle.