FreeCell Online — Play Free, Every Card Visible
FreeCell is a solitaire game in which all 52 cards are dealt face up into eight columns, four single-card holding spaces called free cells sit beside them, and you win by building four foundation piles from Ace to King in suit. Because nothing is hidden, FreeCell is a game of pure planning rather than luck — almost every deal can be won by someone who works it out. Clear Solitaire runs it in your browser with large, high-contrast cards, no download and no account.
The board
Eight columns. All 52 cards go straight onto the table face up: seven cards each in the first four columns and six each in the last four. There is no stock, no waste, and nothing to turn over. Everything you will ever need to know is on the screen from move one.
Four free cells. Four boxes across the top, each of which holds exactly one card. A card in a free cell is out of the way but not gone — you can bring it back to the tableau or send it to a foundation whenever it fits.
Four foundations. As in Klondike, one per suit, built Ace through King. On this site each empty foundation shows which suit it is waiting for.
The rules
Tableau building. Cards stack downward in alternating colours: a black 6 on a red 7, a red J on a black Q. Same as Klondike, and the only build rule in the game.
Free cells. Any exposed card — the bottom card of a column, or a card already in a cell — can move into an empty free cell. Cells are temporary parking, not storage; a full set of four occupied cells is close to a lost game.
Empty columns. Any card may be moved into an empty column. There is no King restriction. Like the free cells, an empty column is manoeuvring room, but it is worth far more.
Foundations. Aces go up as soon as they are exposed, then 2s, and so on. You can pull a card back down from a foundation here if you need it as a landing spot.
Winning. All 52 cards on the foundations. On most deals, once the position is untangled the rest plays itself — press A and the board finishes automatically, one undoable move at a time.
Supermoves: why more than one card moves at once
Strictly, FreeCell only ever moves one card. What looks like moving a five-card run is really the game doing the shuffling for you: it parks cards in free cells and empty columns, moves the bottom card, then unpacks them onto it. This is called a supermove, and its size is not arbitrary — it is fixed by how much space you have.
The maximum number of cards you can move in one go is:
(free cells empty + 1) × 2 ^ (empty columns)
Four empty cells and no empty columns lets you move five cards. Four empty cells and one empty column lets you move ten. Four cells and two empty columns lets you move twenty — more than you will ever need.
There is one catch worth memorising: if you are moving the run into an empty column, that column cannot also be used as a staging area, so it drops out of the exponent. Moving into your only empty column with four free cells gives you five cards, not ten.
Clear Solitaire performs supermoves for you when the space exists, and refuses them clearly when it doesn’t, rather than letting you drag a run that cannot legally arrive. The counter in the corner tells you how many cards you can currently move.
Strategy for FreeCell
FreeCell rewards thinking before touching. Every card is visible, which means every mistake is yours — and every win is too.
Keep the free cells empty
This is the whole game in one line. A free cell holding a card is a free cell not multiplying your supermove size. Cards go into cells to be taken straight back out, ideally within the same sequence of moves. If you are three cells deep with no plan for getting them back, stop and undo.
Watch for the classic trap: parking a card in a cell whose only home is buried under twelve cards. That card never comes out, and you are playing the rest of the game with three cells.
An empty column is worth more than all four cells
Look at the formula again. Cells add; columns double. Emptying your shortest column early — usually one of columns 5 through 8, which start with six cards — is the highest-value opening plan in FreeCell, and it is usually available if you go looking for it.
Plan a target, not a move
Before you touch anything, find the deepest card you need: often an Ace or a 2 buried near the top of a long column. Count what sits on top of it and where each of those cards can legally go. If the answer is “nowhere”, find a different target. FreeCell games are won by choosing the right excavation, not by making locally tidy moves.
Do not send everything home
The reflex to send every available card to the foundations will cost you games. A red 6 on the foundation is a red 6 that can no longer catch a black 5. A useful test: hold a card back if both opposite-colour cards one rank below it are still in play and still buried. Aces and 2s are always safe to send.
Watch for suit pairs that block each other
If the 5 and 6 of the same suit are in the same column with the 5 above the 6, they will need two separate homes — they can never sit on each other. Spotting these early tells you how much space the column will really cost.
Undo is part of the method
FreeCell is a puzzle, and puzzles are solved by exploring. Press U and try the other branch. On a solver-verified deal, a line exists; backing up until you find it is the game, not a failure of it.
Playing FreeCell here
FreeCell’s problem, visually, is that it puts all 52 cards on screen at once. Columns here use a stack offset that keeps every card’s rank and suit readable rather than reducing buried cards to a stripe, and card faces stay near-white in dark mode so red and black pips keep their contrast.
Cards default to Large. Large Print goes further, enlarging ranks and suit symbols for anyone who finds standard card faces a strain — a real difference on a game where you need to read a dozen cards at a glance to plan a move.
Winnable deals only is on by default, though in FreeCell it changes less than in other games: the overwhelming majority of random FreeCell deals are solvable to begin with. What it does guarantee is that you are never handed one of the rare dead ones.
Unlimited undo (U), redo (R) and a hint key (H) are available. The whole board is keyboard-operable: arrow keys to move focus, Enter or Space to pick up and put down, Escape to cancel, A to finish a solved position. Nothing covers the board: no ads over the cards, no pop-ups, no forced video, no account, nothing to install.
Frequently asked questions
Are all FreeCell games solvable?
Almost, but not quite. FreeCell is unusual among solitaire games in that the overwhelming majority of random deals can be won with perfect play — our own solver proved 97.6% of the random shuffles it scanned. The most famous demonstration of this is the classic set of 32,000 numbered FreeCell deals that circulated with early computer versions of the game: exhaustive analysis found exactly one of them, deal 11,982, to be unsolvable. That ratio is why FreeCell has the reputation of being a game of skill rather than luck. It does not mean every deal is easy: plenty of solvable deals require a long, exact sequence that will defeat you several times first. Clear Solitaire’s Winnable deals only setting, on by default, makes sure you never meet one of the rare unsolvable ones.
What is a supermove in FreeCell?
A supermove is when several cards move as a group instead of one at a time. Strictly speaking FreeCell only ever moves one card, so a supermove is the game automatically parking the upper cards in your empty free cells and empty columns, moving the bottom card, and then stacking them back on top. Because of that, the size of a supermove is limited by your free space, not by the rules of stacking. The formula is (number of empty free cells + 1) × 2 ^ (number of empty columns): four empty cells and no empty column moves five cards; four cells and one empty column moves ten; four cells and two empty columns moves twenty. One exception catches everyone out — if you are moving the group into an empty column, that column can’t double the count, so four cells and one empty column moves five cards into it, not ten. This is the practical reason empty columns matter far more than free cells.
What is the best strategy for FreeCell?
Keep the free cells empty and get a column empty early. Those two habits decide most games, because both directly increase how many cards you can move at once, and the whole game is a fight for manoeuvring room. Beyond that: plan an excavation before you move — pick the buried card you actually need, count what sits on top of it, and check each of those cards has somewhere legal to go; send Aces and 2s home immediately but hold back mid-rank cards that are still needed as landing spots for the opposite colour; prefer moves that expose a card you can use over moves that merely look neat; and use undo to explore branches rather than restarting. Because nothing is hidden, FreeCell is the one solitaire game where thinking longer genuinely converts into winning more.