How to Play

Tap a card to pick it up, then tap where it should go. A card lands on a card one rank higher of the opposite colour, any card at all may be moved into an empty column, and the foundations build up from the ace in each suit. Double-tap a card to send it to the best legal spot it has — home first, then a real stack, then a free cell. A whole run moves at once when you have the room for it: the most you can shift in one go is one card per empty free cell plus one, doubled for every empty column, and the game tells you the number when a move is too big. UNDO goes back as far as you like, AUTO sweeps up everything that is safe to send home, and NEW deals again. On a keyboard: U undoes, A runs AUTO, Escape puts down the card you are holding.

Tips

• Free cells are not storage, they are working space. Every card you park costs you move capacity as well as a slot — the run you can shift in one go is one card per EMPTY cell plus one, doubled for every empty column, so a full set of cells leaves you moving a single card at a time. Put a card in a cell only when you can already see how it comes out again.
• An empty column is worth far more than a free cell, because it doubles everything. One empty column turns a three-card move into six; two turn it into twelve. That is why clearing the shortest column early is usually a better opening than chasing an ace — and why spending an empty column to park a lone king is one of the most expensive moves on the board.
• Do not send every ace home the moment you see it. A low card on a foundation is gone for good as far as the table is concerned, and a two of hearts is sometimes the only place your black ace-of-spades-side cards can land. AUTO holds a card back until both opposite-colour foundations have caught up, which is the same rule worth applying by hand.
• The score only counts cards you actually get home, and it remembers your best rather than your current total — so pulling a card back off a foundation to free a move costs you nothing, and neither does any amount of shuffling. Undo is genuinely free. Finishing carries a bonus that shrinks with every move you make, so the clean win is worth more than the long one, and the two-cell game pays over twice the four-cell game for the same work.

Behind this game

Almost nothing in FreeCell is irreversible, so almost any way of scoring it can be farmed by shuffling one card back and forth. Only four things in the game cannot be taken back.

Read how I fixed it — a devlog by Neeraj Kotwani, who builds every game here.

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