How to play FreeCell: rules, the free cells, and your first win
FreeCell is the solitaire game where nothing is hidden. Every card is dealt face up at the start, so the whole puzzle is in front of you from the first move, and that single fact is what makes it special: there is almost no luck, just planning. The rules are short, but the way the free cells and empty columns work together trips up beginners. This guide lays it all out plainly: what every part of the board is for, which moves are legal, and a simple order to play in so your first game actually finishes. You can play FreeCell on Melio for free while you read, with no signup.
What FreeCell is: a game with no hidden cards
Most solitaire games keep cards face down and make you uncover them as you go, so part of the challenge is not knowing what is coming. FreeCell is the opposite. The entire deck is dealt face up, spread across the board, before you touch a thing. You can see all 52 cards at once.
This is called full information, and it changes the nature of the game completely. There is no luck of the draw to blame and no hidden card to hope for. Every deal is a logic puzzle with a fixed answer, and your job is to find the order of moves that gets there. That is also why FreeCell rewards patience: the right move is always somewhere on the board, you just have to spot it.
The board: eight columns, four cells, four foundations
FreeCell uses a single 52-card deck and lays it out into three areas. Learn these names and the rest of the game is easy to follow.
- The tableau is the main playing area: eight columns of face-up cards across the middle. The first four columns get seven cards each and the last four get six, which uses up all 52. This is where you do most of your work.
- The four free cells are the single slots in one top corner. Each one holds exactly one card, like a temporary parking spot. They start empty.
- The four foundations are the slots in the other top corner, one per suit. Filling all four, ace through king, is how you win. They also start empty.
Because everything is dealt face up, there is no stock and no waste pile to draw from. The cards you start with are the cards you have, and the whole game is about moving them into the right order.
The goal: build each suit up from the ace
You win when all 52 cards have reached the foundations. Each foundation holds one suit and is built up in order: the ace first, then the 2, the 3, and so on through the 10, jack, queen, and king. So the hearts foundation goes ace of hearts, 2 of hearts, 3 of hearts, all the way to the king, and the same for spades, diamonds, and clubs.
That is the entire objective. Everything else, the shuffling in the tableau and the parking in the free cells, exists only to feed those four piles in the right order.
Building down in alternating colors
The tableau is where you arrange cards into position, and one rule governs it.
Build down in alternating colors. You can place a card on a tableau column only if it is one rank lower than the card it lands on and the opposite color. Red goes on black, black goes on red. So a black 6 (spades or clubs) can land on a red 7 (hearts or diamonds). A red 9 can land on a black 10. Color is what matters, not suit: a 6 of clubs and a 6 of spades are interchangeable here because both are black.
An empty column is the one exception: any card, of any rank or suit, can move into a column that has been emptied out. Unlike Klondike solitaire, you do not need a king. That makes empty columns extremely valuable, and we will come back to why.
What the free cells are for
The four free cells are the heart of what makes this game work. Each cell holds a single card, face up, out of the way. You can move any card from the tableau into an open free cell, and you can move a card out of a free cell back onto the tableau (if it fits a column legally) or up to a foundation (if it is the next card that suit needs).
Think of them as four temporary parking spots. When a card you need is buried under one you do not, you can lift the blocker into a free cell to get it out of the way, then deal with it later. That is the move that unsticks almost every jam.
The catch is that a free cell is temporary. A card sitting in a cell does nothing useful there: it cannot be built on, and it occupies a slot you might need for a bigger move. The skill of FreeCell is spending cells freely when they help and emptying them again as soon as you can. A board with all four cells full and no clear way to empty them is usually a board in trouble.
The supermove: shifting a whole run at once
Strictly speaking, FreeCell only ever moves one card at a time. But moving cards one by one through the free cells is tedious, so the game does the bookkeeping for you with what is often called a supermove: you pick up a run of cards in order and the game shifts the whole group in a single action.
The number of cards you can move at once is not unlimited. It depends on how much free space you have, because behind the scenes the game is using your empty free cells and empty columns as scratch space to relay the cards across. The rule of thumb:
- Each empty free cell lets you move one extra card on top of the single card you could always move.
- Each empty column roughly doubles how many cards you can shift, because a whole run can be staged there mid-move.
So with all four free cells open and no empty columns, you can move a run of five. Free up a column as well and that number climbs sharply. The practical takeaway: the more free space you keep, the bigger the runs you can relocate, which is yet another reason to guard your free cells and empty columns. On Melio you do not have to count it out, the board lets you grab a legal run and will only complete the move if you have the space for it.
The order of operations for your first win
Knowing the rules is not the same as knowing what to do first. Here is a reliable sequence to work through on every game.
- Read the board before you move. Because everything is face up, take a moment to find where the aces and low cards are buried. Those are the cards you will need first, so knowing what is sitting on top of them tells you what has to be cleared.
- Send aces and 2s up early. Any ace you can reach should go to a foundation, and any 2 whose ace is already up can follow. These moves are almost always safe and they free up the cards that were on top of them.
- Build runs in the tableau before spending cells. If a card can land on another card in the tableau, prefer that to dropping it in a free cell. Cells are a last resort, not a first move, because a card in the tableau still does work and a card in a cell does not.
- Work to empty a column. An empty column is the most powerful resource in the game: it takes any card and it multiplies how many cards a supermove can shift. Clearing a short column early pays off for the rest of the game.
The one habit that separates a finished game from a stuck one: do not fill all four free cells without a plan. It is tempting to park cards the moment they are in the way, but every cell you spend is one less you have for the next move. Before you drop a card into a cell, look for where it will come back out. If you cannot see a way to empty it again soon, that move may be what traps you ten moves later. Spend cells to reach a clear goal, and reclaim them as fast as you can.
Playing it on Melio
Melio FreeCell keeps the controls out of your way. Tap a face-up card to pick it up, then tap where it should go, the board only accepts legal landings, so you cannot make an illegal move by accident. Tap a card on its own and Melio will send it straight to a foundation when that move is available, and grab a valid run to move the whole group at once when you have the space for it.
What makes it a good place to learn is the full undo: every move can be taken back, which means you can try a line of play, see what it opens up, and reverse it if it leads nowhere. Since FreeCell is a pure logic puzzle with no hidden cards, that undo button is the fastest way to build an intuition for which moves help and which ones quietly trap you.