How to play
The game
FreeCell is a solitaire card game with simple rules that blend together to create a tricky yet rewarding puzzle in every deal. In FreeCell Fable, every game you play will be winnable, though some will be harder than others! As you win games, you’ll unlock the paintings in the gallery and discover the story of the crown as you dust them off.
On this page you’ll learn how to play the game, get a couple strategy pointers, and find links to more in-depth resources.
Don’t worry, though, if you’re not much one for instructions, you can go poke around in the game and figure it out there. FreeCell Fable won’t let you make any invalid moves. And you definitely don’t need to read all of this before playing! It’s just here to answer questions that might come up.
The goal
The goal of FreeCell is to move all the cards to the piles in the upper right. These are called discard piles and there is one for each suit.
The cards are dealt to the eight piles across the bottom. These piles are called cascades.
The four spaces in the upper left are called cells and are what the game is named after! Each game starts with four free cells.
The Rules
There are only a few valid moves in FreeCell. We’ll list them and then look at some examples.
You can only move one card at a time. (More on this in a moment!)
You can move a card to a discard pile only if it’s the same suit as the pile and the next greater value. If the discard pile is empty you can only move the Ace to it. If the Ace is there, you can only move the 2, etc.
You cannot move cards off a discard pile.
You can move any card to a free cell, but a cell can only hold one card!
You can move a card on top of another card on a cascade only if it’s of opposite color and the next lower value. E.g. you can put a red 7 on top of a black 8.
You can only move the card at the top of a cascade. (Visually this will be the card in a cascade closest to the bottom of the screen.)
Some Example Moves
This is how a FreeCell game looks when it starts. It might be a little overwhelming at first, but after playing around a bit, it all starts to make sense!
Let’s move some cards around on the cascades. You can move cards by dragging them or by tapping on them. If you tap a card and it doesn’t go where you expected, just undo and drag it to the right place.
To start, we can move the 10 of Clubs to the Jack of Diamonds because they’re opposite colors and 10 is one less than Jack. Similarly, the 9 of Diamonds can be moved to the 10 of Clubs.
We’ll move the 6 of Diamonds to the 7 of Spades. Next, it would be nice to move the 5 of Spades to the 6 of Diamonds, but the 6 of Spades is in the way! Not to worry, that’s what the cells are for! We’ll move the 6 of Spades to a free cell and then move the 5 of Spaced over.
At this point we have a nice stack starting with the Jack of Diamonds. We can move it to the Queen of Spades, but in order to do so, we have to use the free cells again. We could individually move the 10 of Clubs and the 9 of Diamonds up, move the Jack of Diamonds over and then move the other two cards back down, but FreeCell Fable makes this a little easier on us!
Just drag the Jack of Diamonds over to the Queen of Spades – better yet, just tap it, and it’ll move over! While this looks like multiple cards moving at once, FreeCell Fable is just helping us out by taking care of the individual moves.
If you try to tap or drag a card and it doesn’t move, it’s because there isn’t a valid move for that card or because there isn’t enough free space on the board to make the move.
We’ll do a little more sorting and move the Queen of Spades over to the King of Hearts and the 3 of Clubs and 2 of Diamonds onto to 4 of Hearts.
Now that the Ace of Clubs is on top of the cascade, we can move it to the discard pile, and then put the 2 of Clubs on it, as well. Finally, we’re starting to clear out some cards!
As you play through a deal, you’ll sort the cards more and more and keep moving cards up to the discard piles. Eventually all the cards will be discarded or sorted and you’ll have won that hand! In FreeCell Fable, when the only moves left are putting cards on the discard piles, the hand will be over.
Open Cascades
We’ll take a look at another game to see what happens when we have an open cascade. They look a lot like free cells, but they’re quite different because they can hold a whole stack! This means they’re really helpful.
In this example, we have a tall stack built up on the 9 of Hearts. It would be great to move that whole stack over to the 10 of Spades but we only have 3 free cells. We also have that free cascade, but even if we use it to hold a card, we can only move 5 cards.
Thankfully, we can do better than that! Instead of just putting just the 3 of Diamonds on the cascade, we can move part of the big stack there. By putting the 6 of Clubs on the open cascade, our cells are still free and so we can move the 9 of Hearts to the 10 of Spades, then move the 6 of Clubs over from the cascade. We can even do this in one move by just moving the 9 of Hearts over.
FreeCell Fable takes care of all the individual moves and won’t let us move a stack if we don’t have enough space.
Different versions of FreeCell have different names for this technique. Some call it a power move, some call it a super move. It’s special enough to get its own name because each open cascade makes a big difference in how many card you can move. For example, with 4 free cells you can move a stack of 5 cards. With 2 free cells and two 2 cascades you can move a stack of 12 cards!
Undo
Occasionally, and especially while learning the game, you’ll end up without any available moves. Drats! Strictly speaking, undoing isn’t part of the FreeCell rules, but half the fun is figuring out those tricky puzzles. To make it easy to back up and try again, FreeCell Fable lets you undo.
You can press the undo button in the lower right or swipe left on the table to undo a move. If you need to undo several moves, hold down the button or hold the swipe.
Don’t worry too much about undoing, getting stuck is part of the game and you’ll get better at FreeCell by working through a tough game.
The Painting Gallery
The wall in FreeCell Fable is covered in paintings that tell the tale of the crown. As you win games, you’ll uncover more and more paintings until you discover the fate of the crown!
After you win a game the progress bar will show you how close you are to unlocking the next painting. Some paintings will take more wins to uncover than others.
If you use undo while solving a deal, you won’t make as much progress towards unlocking the next painting. However, if you tap a card and it goes to the wrong place you can undo one move to drag that same card elsewhere without penalty.
If you get really stuck in a game, you can always give up the hand, but if you do you’ll lose some of your progress towards the next painting!
A Few Pointers
When learning FreeCell it can be very tempting to go straight for the Aces and start discarding cards as soon as possible. This works for some deals, but for most, it’s a short path to a dead end! Usually you’re better off focusing on sorting the cascades before trying to discard cards.
It’s also a good habit to make sure you have a plan to get your free cells back before you use them. Look for opportunities to reorder a chunk of one or two cascades in a series of moves that leaves with the same number of free cells open. This isn’t always possible, but when it is, it’s usually a good idea!
As noted in the section about open cascades, they’re really powerful! An open cascade will help you win a hand a lot more than an open free cell. Once you have one open, try really hard to leave it open, and use it to clear another one!
All that said, some deals are just really, really tricky! If you’re just getting started and you’ve restarted a deal a few times and can’t figure it out, don’t feel bad about giving up on a hand to learn something from another deal.
A Couple Nerdy Notes
FreeCell is a very, very popular game! As a result, there are several sites devoted to it, even one that has solutions to a million games. It’s also special in some ways that make it really interesting to computer scientists and game theory nerds.
Many games, including FreeCell Fable, use a particular technique to shuffle the deck that lets us number the games. The technique comes from Microsoft’s version of the game. FreeCell Fable will choose from the first million games, excluding the 8 known impossible games.
Speaking of millions of games, there are approximately 1.75×10⁶⁴ distinct games of FreeCell - That’s 17,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in case you’re not comfortable with scientific notation!
One unique characteristics of FreeCell is that you can see all the cards at the beginning of each hand. This is part of what makes FreeCell as much of a puzzle as it is game. There's no luck involved! This means that if a hand has a solution, you could theoretically find it before making a single move. Of course that would mean keeping every move in your head as you worked it out, so while theoretically possible, that doesn’t do us humans much good.
So, yeah, the FreeCell rabbit hole on the internet is very deep! Thankfully you don’t need to go anywhere near it to enjoy the game. If you’re interesting, however, here are a few sites to get started with.