1Blake and Gent measured FreeCell solvability at 99.998881% of random deals in 2019. Of the original 32,000 numbered deals in Microsoft FreeCell, only deal #11982 has been proven unsolvable.
2FreeCell is one of the only solitaire card games where almost every deal can be won with perfect play. Klondike, by comparison, was measured by Blake and Gent at 81.945% solvable on draw three, so roughly one deal in five cannot be won at all.
3FreeCell was invented by Paul Alfille in 1978 and first programmed on the PLATO educational computer system at the University of Illinois.
4All 52 cards in FreeCell are dealt face-up at the start of the game, making it a game of pure strategy with no hidden information, unlike most other solitaire games.
5The four free cells in FreeCell act as temporary storage, each holding exactly one card at a time, and provide the strategic flexibility that makes nearly every deal winnable.
6Microsoft FreeCell, included with Windows since 1995, numbered each deal from 1 to 32,000. Deal #11982 is the only one of these deals confirmed to have no solution. Our numbered deals use our own provably fair shuffle, so they are not the same layouts as the Microsoft deals of the same number.
7FreeCell uses a single standard 52-card deck dealt into 8 tableau columns: four columns of 7 cards and four columns of 6 cards, with all cards visible from the start.
