FreeCell online: about 62 moves between you and a win

FreeCell deals all 52 cards face up at the start, so from the first second you are looking at the whole puzzle. There is no stock to turn and no luck of the draw to wait on. You have eight columns, four free cells to park single cards in, and four foundations to fill from Ace to King.

Because nothing is hidden, a FreeCell game has a definite length once you know the route. Our solver found a way through for 99.68% of 10,000 deals, and the solutions it found averaged 62.2 moves. That is not the shortest possible route, just the first one it found, but it gives you a feel for the size of the job: a bit over sixty careful moves.

That makes FreeCell a good fit for a short break with a clear head. It is the game where a few seconds of looking saves you a dozen wasted moves.

FreeCell at a glance

Just under half the deals give you an Ace on the very first move. In the other half, your opening moves are about digging.

FreeCell rules on solitaire-online.nz

• The layout. Eight columns, four of seven cards and four of six, all face up. Four free cells top left, four foundations top right.
• Columns. Build down in alternating colours: a black 6 on a red 7.
• Free cells. Each holds one card until you move it out again.
• Empty columns. A cleared column accepts any card.
• Foundations. Build each suit from Ace to King.
• Moving runs. The game will move a tidy run in one go if you have enough empty cells and columns to do it card by card: empty cells + empty columns + 1 cards at a time.

Spending your moves wisely

Look first

With everything face up, planning is free and moves are not. Find the four Aces and the 2s, count how many cards sit on top of each, and start with the one that is cheapest to reach.

Treat free cells as borrowed space

We tested the same deals with fewer cells. With three cells, 96.0% were solved; with two, 74.0%; with one, 17.4%; with none, 0.2%. Every card you leave sitting in a cell is playing with one cell fewer, and the drop gets steep quickly.

An empty column is worth more than a cell

It takes any card, gives a whole run somewhere to go, and adds one to the number of cards the game will move for you in a single go. Once you have one, do not fill it without a reason.

Undo is part of the game

Since almost every deal can be won, a lost game usually means a wrong turn somewhere. Back up a few moves and try the other road.

On your phone, tablet or computer

FreeCell runs in the browser on any modern device, with nothing to download and no sign-up. Tap a card then its destination, or drag it. The cards are large and clear, with zoom if you want them bigger. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are always there, and the game counts your moves and time so you can see how close you get to that 62-move mark. Sound, fullscreen and table colour can all be changed.

What a FreeCell session looks like

FreeCell games have a slow start and a fast finish. The first few moves are the thinking part: finding the Aces, deciding which column to empty, and working out where the first few cards will park. Once an Ace or two is home and a column is clear, the rest usually runs smoothly, and Auto Play can take over near the end.

That shape is why a quick look before you move pays off so well. The solver's routes averaged 62.2 moves, but a person who moves first and thinks later can easily double that with detours and undos. Spend the first minute looking, and the game tends to take care of itself.

It also means a FreeCell game is easy to pause. Nothing is hidden, so when you come back you can see exactly where you were and what you planned.

How we did the research, step by step

In September 2026 the solitaire-online.nz team set out to answer two practical questions about FreeCell on this site: how often is a deal winnable, and how long is the route when it is?

1. We began with this site's game code. Eight columns dealt 7-7-7-7-6-6-6-6, all face up, four cells, alternating colours, any card to an empty column. The site's limit on moving runs cannot change whether a deal is winnable, because the same run can always be moved one card at a time.
2. A faithful copy of the game. We wrote the rules into a program and tested the solver's proofs of impossible deals against a completely separate brute-force search.
3. Numbered deals. Each of the 10,000 shuffles comes from a numbered seed, so the test can be repeated deal for deal. These are not the numbers from the old Windows game.
4. A solver. FreeCell has no hidden cards, so a solver is playing the same game you are. Ours always looks at the most promising position next and makes only automatic foundation moves that can never hurt.
5. Two passes. Every deal got up to 200,000 positions. Deals still unsolved were run again with up to 1,000,000. After that, 32 deals were still undecided and none had been proven impossible.
6. A check against published results. Blake & Gent, 2026 put winnable FreeCell deals at 99.998881%. Ours agrees: zero impossible deals, 0.32% undecided. Our reduced-cell results agree with theirs too.
7. Error bars. A 95% range is where the figure would land 19 times in 20 if we repeated the whole test. For solution length it is 61.9 to 62.4 moves.
8. Limits. The 62.2 moves is the length of the first route the solver found, not the shortest. The solver also never uses the site's option of taking a card back off a foundation, which can only make our figures a touch low.

The technical side

The program is Python 3.11, standard library only. FreeCell and Baker's share one module, freecell.py, and retry.py handled the second pass on hard deals. The solver is a best-first search: it scores each position by the cards still to go home and the cards sitting on lower ones, always expands the best-scoring position next, and keeps a table of positions it has already seen so it never repeats itself. runner.py spread the work over 19 worker processes, and the 10,000-deal run took around 18 minutes. As a cross-check, verify_freecell_bruteforce.py, a separate search using single-card moves only, re-examined 2 deals the solver had called impossible in the three-cell test and agreed with both.

The error bars are Wilson score intervals. We used an AI assistant, Claude by Anthropic, to help write and review the code and draft the text. Every figure on this page came from running the code, not from the AI, and the team checked the results against the published study.

By Admin, solitaire-online.nz. Study date: 18 September 2026.

Short answers before your next deal

Should I send cards to the foundations straight away?

Not always. Once a card is on a foundation, nothing in the columns can be built on it, so a red 5 sent up early might have been the only home for a black 4. Auto Play is safe to use at the end, once every card is effectively free. Earlier in the game, think about which low cards might still need somewhere to go.

How many moves does a FreeCell game take?

Our solver's routes averaged 62.2 moves. People usually take more, because they explore and undo along the way.

Could any of my deals be impossible?

Almost. We found no impossible deal in 10,000, and the published estimate is 99.998881%.

What if I run out of free cells?

Back up with Undo. Full cells with no empty column means you can only move one card at a time, and that is usually where games are lost.

Is FreeCell good on a phone?

Yes. Tap to move, and use zoom if the eight columns feel cramped.

Want the same layout with a sterner test?

Baker's Solitaire uses the same layout with stricter rules. For something with hidden cards, try Klondike, or see every game on the games page.