Deal #9998: Winnable With No Free Cells
Deal #9998 is one of 69 deals among Microsoft's original 32,000 that can be won without putting a single card in a free cell, according to FreeCell researcher Michael Keller. Deal #11987 is another.
It starts gently. Before any other move, five cards can go straight to the foundations: the Aces of hearts and spades, then the Ace of clubs, the 2 of clubs, and the Ace of diamonds. Our game never moves cards for you, so double-click each one to send it home. For a harder test, try to win while keeping all four cells empty.
How FreeCell Deal Numbers Work
Jim Horne, who wrote FreeCell for Windows, turned each deal number into a fixed shuffle with the random number generator in Microsoft's C compiler, so a number always deals the same layout. The original game had deals 1 to 32,000. Windows XP raised the range to 1,000,000 in 2001 and kept the first 32,000 unchanged. Many FreeCell programs copy the method, so a deal number means the same layout in each of them, ours included.
Numbered deals do not come from our provably fair shuffle. Microsoft's method is public, so anyone can work out a numbered layout in advance, which is what lets players share and compare them. For a deal nobody could know before it was dealt, start a game on the FreeCell page.
On this page, Next Deal opens deal #9999, Restart deals #9998 again from the start, and Share Deal copies this page's link. A numbered deal saves separately from your game on the main FreeCell page, so moving between the two loses neither.
Play Another Numbered Deal
Deals with a story:
- Deal #11982: the unwinnable deal
- Deal #1941: the hardest deal you can win
- Deal #617: often the first hard deal for players going in order
- Deal #11987: winnable with no free cells
- Deal #1: the first deal
For the rules, strategy, and a random deal, go back to FreeCell.
