Jones's solver confirms that those two deals are impossible as card flourishes. Deals from other programs have not been examined in detail for card flourishes, but Scott Kladke found the NetCELL deal which can be solved fairly easily as a card flourish. Later, Jason, using a new program he calls Flourish Explorer, extended the analysis through the first million deals, and found a total of candidates for card flourishes.
Danny's solver has found solutions for of those; 19 are impossible and 62 are so far unsolved. The search for candidates is very fast Jason searched million deals in seconds, making a search of the entire 8 billion deals possible in about 3 hours , but the process of looking for actual solutions is very slow over 17 hours for the analysis of the candidates.
Danny's solver also found a solution to using only three freecells. A related variation, which does not depend on any special arrangements of the cards, is to play without moving any cards to the homecells foundations , trying to arrange the cards in four ace-to king sequences on four of the empty columns. This idea may have come from the solitaire Spider; it also can be used in Yukon and other games.
This Spider variant is very difficult, and I do not know what percentage of games can be solved in this way. FreeCell Pro now allows you to play the Spider variant, but you cannot play the Spider variant in the Microsoft version, or any other version where autoplay is automatic and cannot be turned off.
The Warfield and Allen programs mentioned above both allow it, as do some other programs. In the standard form of the game, cards which are played to the homecells must remain there. Some variations of solitaire e. Giant, a variant of Miss Milligan , specifically allow cards to be played from the foundations back to tableau columns in English solitaire parlance, this is called worrying back.
It doesn't make sense in games such as Baker's Game which pack in suit, but there's no reason why it couldn't be allowed as a variant in FreeCell. Some FC programs allow worrying back as part of the standard rules; Solitaire Virtuoso provides it as an optional rule. Worrying back has a very small influence on the win rate, at least in the standard four freecell game: Tom Holroyd did some computer analysis and found 11 deals impossible with the standard rules that can be won by worrying back at least one card from a foundation back onto an occupied column is still impossible, though.
Jones extended the analysis up to million, increasing the total to 69 deals winnable only by worrying back: Holroyd , , , , , , , , , , , Jones , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Here's a neat solution by Danny's solver, in which diamonds are worried back three times to solve number D indicates a move from the diamond foundation pile :.
In the brief section on history, we mentioned Baker's Game, the in-suit relative of FreeCell, as well as much older predecessors like Eight Off. Baker's Game and FreeCell are the two most interesting games, in my view, since they allow any card to be moved to an empty column, so that the emphasis is on building sequences on the tableau, rather than moving cards to foundations as quickly as possible. But two other modern variants of Eight Off are also worth mentioning: 1 Seahaven Towers , invented by Art Cabral, which resembles Eight Off, except that there are ten columns of five cards each, with the two remaining cards dealt into two of the four available depots freecells.
This first appeared as a Macintosh game, but versions for Windows and probably other platforms are easy to find. Mark E. Masten has confirmed this with a run of 15 million deals, with 13,, wins Using Tom Holroyd's Patsolve solver, the first 32, MS deals dealing cards in the same order to ten columns instead of eight were analyzed with both rules. Under standard KingOnly rules 28, deals are winnable The help file for the original version mentions a harder variant which is not implemented there : eight columns of six with the four remaining cards dealt to all four depots; this is identical to ForeCell except that the tableau columns are packed in suit.
Jones has analyzed this variant and found that only 3, deals are winnable out of the first 32, MS deals; in 1, deals no moves at all are possible. It also appears in a number of compendium programs, including Pretty Good Solitaire and Solitude. Penguin is an interesting variant of Eight Off, with seven columns of seven cards, and seven depots. The first card dealt to the first column is the foundation base, and the other cards of the same rank are played immediately to the foundations as they are dealt, so that the last foundation card is buried at the bottom of the first column at the end of the initial deal.
Sequences in suit can be moved from pile to pile without requiring depots i. Relaxed play ; this is an exception to the usual rule in games of the Eight Off family.
Mark Masten modified the Woods solver and ran fifty million random deals, estimating the win rate at Thomas Warfield, author of Pretty Good Solitaire as well as other solitaire packages, has started a FC page which includes links to various sites, including ours, and a few of the computer versions of FC, including Warfield's packages FreeCell Plus a Windows 3.
Computer Versions and Features. Well, most of us are using a computer to deal and keep track of the deals, and FCPro can record solutions automatically. I think it is quite reasonable to use a computer to do things which would be impossible, tedious, or time-consuming to do otherwise.
The variable-freecell solver makes it possible to categorize random deals into six groups based on a rough difficulty rating, while leaving the more interesting task of actually solving individual deals to humans all of the solutions in the catalog were found by humans without computer assistance. The biggest flaw in Microsoft FreeCell is its dialog box which pops up every time you want to move to an empty column, asking if you want to move a single card or a sequence of cards.
Moves of single cards to empty columns when a move of more than one card from a column is possible are very rare the standard notation allows for this, but there is not a single instance of it in the catalog of over solutions; I do not remember ever doing so when playing MS FreeCell , and it can always be done anyway in two steps by moving the single card to a freecell first, then to the empty column.
This dialog box was eliminated very early in the development of FreeCell Pro, and most good versions of FreeCell either automatically move the maximum number of cards to an empty column, or use a drag-and-drop interface though this is not as good an interface for FreeCell; NetCELL, strangely, allows drag-and-drop for single card movement only. Yahoo's version of FreeCell makes a different mistake -- it uses the selection method, but requires the player to select the top of the sequence to be moved, rather than simply choosing the column to be moved from the rare cases where it is desirable to move part of a sequence to an empty column can also be handled by individual moves to freecells; a well-designed program would use alt-click, shift-click or control-click to select an exact partial sequence -- I have never seen this implemented.
A first-rate program would allow the user to customize the selection method to behave exactly as preferred FreeCell Pro allows the user to choose what action, if any, is taken on double clicks. Every program should have autoplay of all cards which are safe to move to the homecells preferably using the strong NetCELL autoplay rules described at the end of section 2 ; this speeds up play, especially at the finish.
Being able to turn off autoplay completely is a nice optional feature. Poorly designed programs often make one of two errors: either not having autoplay at all, or playing every possible card to the homecells as discussed earlier under AllPlay, this makes many deals much harder and on rare occasions impossible.
Every program should have selectable, numbered deals; part of the culture of FreeCell is the discussion of hard or unusual deals. Many versions of FreeCell, even non-Windows versions, have adopted the Microsoft deal numbers, at least for the first million deals. FreeCell is an open solitaire -- the identity of every card is supposed to be visible at the start; this can be a problem with aces in particular if the cards are tightly packed together.
Spreading the cards in each column far enough apart is the easiest way to do this a large enough screen, as in FreeCell Pro, can easily hold the maximum possible 18 cards in a column. Microsoft FreeCell, which uses a very small screen, allows any card to be identified by a right-click, which momentarily displays the entire card this is an easy feature to program and is quite useful in other games where there are often many cards in a column, where the spacing between cards in a column is automatically adjusted when it contains more cards than normal.
Some programs use specially designed cards with extra suit indices on the upper right corner, visible even with minimal spacing between the cards. Some very bad versions of FreeCell give the player no way of identifying an ace which is covered by another card; this perverts the nature of the game, which is strategic planning without guesswork.
FCPro was originally written in for the purpose of automatically recording solutions to interesting deals as they are solved by the user. The first version was a "tracking" program which ran while the user was playing the standard Microsoft FreeCell.
It read mouse clicks, interpreted them, and correctly recorded solutions according to the standard FC notation devised by Andrey Tsouladze. In correspondence with Jim Horne , I asked about his algorithm for generating random deals, and he sent me the full C code for the dealing routine. There's nothing particularly tricky about it; a clever programmer could probably work it out by trial and error. But Jim kindly allowed us to incorporate the code into FCPro, and this allowed us to recreate the entire set of 32, deals of the Microsoft version e.
Adrian later realized he could create a larger range of deals using a different storage type for the deal number, and eventially extended the range of deal numbers to over 8 billion.
The first 32, are the same as those in Microsoft's standard version, and the first million are the same as in the Microsoft XP version released in Having Jim's dealing code and the FCPro solution-recording function allowed us to save and later check solutions to the standard deals.
I used FCPro to record and send to Wilson dozens of my solutions to difficult or interesting deals. He had used this to analyze one million random deals, and found that all but 14 were solvable. Adrian incorporated the code into FCPro, and added a function to allow a range of deals to be automatically processed. He also added some sorting routines to rearrange the eight starting columns according to various schemes; this frequently allowed the program to quickly solve a deal which otherwise proved difficult.
Another feature in the program allows the user to select any number of freecells from 0 to 7 -- this works with both the manual play function and the automated solver. FCPro also includes a Next Game function F5 which allows the deals to be easily played in sequence, a new Options menu which allows player preferences to be saved in the program registry, and a Custom Game function which allows any possible deal to be entered through a simple text file.
Most versions of FreeCell now have at least a million deals with the standard numbering. I offer the following deal as a challenge: It is solvable, but it is the most difficult deal I have yet found outside the first 32, Since Microsoft FreeCell for Vista has now corrected its handing of supermoves , a few of the catalog solutions recorded with FreeCell Pro will no longer play back correctly in Microsoft FreeCell.
In particular, when moving a sequence of four cards from a column to an empty column, when there is another empty column and one empty freecell, FCPro breaks it up into three separate two-card moves to match what older versions of MS FC did. FreeCell Pro is now over 20 years old and is essentially moribund no new versions appeared after ears and it is no longer being developed. A relatively new program is the Faslo Freecell Autoplayer developed by S.
Reddi and Gary Campbell, which incorporates Gary's very strong solver. There are also new features not found in FCPro: its game playing function can detect losses up to four moves ahead of time , even when there are moves still available. FFA also has a Hint function which almost instantly suggests the next move or two if desired if the deal is still solvable; this was one of the most-requested features for FCPro, which was never implemented there.
Since the suggested moves come from the solver, they are always going to be good suggestions, unlike some other programs which merely suggest a legal move. You can use backspace to undo moves anytime, even after a loss is signaled.
One of the coolest features another FCPro suggestion never implemented is that when the program signals impossible, you can backspace one move at a time until it signals solvable no need to rerun the solver and click OK as in FCPro. Displayed solutions are much shorter and cleaner than those of FreeCell Pro, and incorporate multi-card moves. Solutions can be played through using the right and left arrow keys. Gary also notes that deals and full or partial solutions can be output to the Windows clipboard and then to a text file using the F9 key, and F6 reads a deal from the clipboard, so you can type a hand-dealt deal or a deal from a non-MS-compatible program into a text file, select, copy, and read into FFA for play and analysis.
The format is a little tricky; the best method is to save an F9 template as a text file and replace the layout text with the deal you want to input. The program can be downloaded and used for free, though donations to Gary for its development are gratefully accepted.
This powerful program may become the new standard for FC analysis programs; at the present its major limitation is that it only handles the standard four-freecell game. Gary's website includes a detailed tutorial. Two other new programs with solvers are being developed in Java. Junyang Gu is developing a solver. A group of students at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands , led by their professor Daan van den Berg, are trying to use the results of human-played FreeCell deals to develop a solver.
There are quite a few packages for Windows which include FreeCell and sometimes variants among their many games. BVS Solitaire Collection is a large package of solitaire games, with many powerful features, including an autoend function which tells you when you are stuck. Their version of FreeCell allows some of the rules to be changed, but does not appear to allow variable numbers of columns and freecells. The deals are numbered, but are not compatible with MS deal numbers.
The program allows either drag-and-drop or select-source-and-destination movement interfaces. Solitaire City is a program recently expanded to 13 games 53 including variants , including FreeCell, Klondike, and Spider. Their version of FreeCell includes seven game variations, six of which can be played against the clock to score points and compete against others tables of the highest scores in each game are published on the website.
The variants are standard, easy similar to low levels of NetCELL where low-ranking cards tend to be dealt later , hard the reverse, like high levels of NetCELL , and one, two, and three freecells. Because the competition is speed-based, the designer, Peter Wiseman, chose not to implement autoplay, and numbered deals are only available as a seventh variant.
The deal numbers go up to , and are compatible with MS deal numbers higher numbers also match those of FreeCell Pro. Solitaire City includes a number of features, including autoend, a tutorial for each game, and a move hint feature which seems to give intelligent suggestions. While there are probably at least a dozen in Windows, I know of a few versions for Macintosh: the first freestanding version was David Bolen's Super Mac Freecell the old home page seems to be gone and the program may no longer be supported.
I have no access to a Macintosh, and have only seen Solitaire House and Super Mac FreeCell, both of which run on experimental Macintosh emulation programs. If anyone has played these and can comment further on their features, or knows of other versions of FreeCell, please let me know. Among the other Windows versions are the Windows 95 version Xcell. There used to be a version of FreeCell and other solitaires for Web TV, from Epsylon Games; this did not work well on an ordinary browser, and I received conflicting reports on how well it worked on Web TV.
The site vanished entirely in A package which runs on a wide variety of platforms is a new edition of the Solitaire Antics package, called Solitaire Antics Ultimate, by Masque Publishing. Other packages available for both Windows and Macintosh are Burning Monkey Solitaire, which has 30 games including FreeCell [apparently no longer available], Solitaire Plus!
Nowadays there are hundreds of versions for both Apple and Android phones, too many to even attempt to evaluate, or even list. I wish I could say it was well done. The screen is tiny about 49x42 mm , and is in color but the suits are red and white and it is easy to mistake hearts for diamonds and clubs for spades.
There are apparently only about different deals the reason for this limitation is not clear , and they are not numbered. The interface is somewhat clumsy, requiring multiple buttons to be pushed for many simple operations such as moving sequences the whole sequence must be selected with a roll up button and moves from freecells other than the lefthand one similar to keyboard notation. Only six cards per column can be displayed, and the roll up button must be pushed to view deeper cards.
This has free versions of FreeCell, TriPeaks, and Klondike deal 3 , and can be expanded to include more than 50 other games and variants. I have also seen a countertop version of FreeCell this is a touchscreen unit, similar to a video game, which can be found in restaurants and bars. Levitan Enterprises, Ltd. Jeffery K. Hughes, the programmer for ESI's version, notes that the deal numbers in this version match those of the standard Microsoft Windows version exactly.
It's been years since I played any video games Intellivision and the original Nintendo , and I have no idea whether there are any other solitaire card games for them. Shlomi Fish has a solver available at his home page it is written in C and runs on various platforms, including DOS. It has many features and can solve deals from FreeCell and a variety of solitaires related to FreeCell.
A new solver by Gary Campbell , which originally ran as a command file under DOS, has recently been integrated into the Faslo program mentioned above. There are a number of other FreeCell solving programs; none of those I have seen appear to be as fast or powerful as the programs mentioned above. Lingyun Tuo wrote a solver as part of his Autofree program. Luc Barthelet wrote a solving application notebook for the analysis package Mathematica. XCell also had a built-in solver the links for these have all disappeared.
There are a number of unpublished solvers I know about. Jones has a very powerful one, which he has used extensively to find solutions and win rates for this FAQ. His standard solver, running under Windows XP on a 1. Adrian Ettlinger, using Don Woods' solver with some extensions of his own, analyzed 20 million deals, starting with the standard 32, of the Microsoft version, and continuing on through deals numbered up to 20,, using the same random number scheme as Microsoft FreeCell, thanks to Jim Horne.
Most notably, we verified the result of the Ring project: all but one deal of the 32, standard deals is solvable! No more unsolvables turned up for more than , more deals. Jones has extended the analysis to 20 million using his own solver of the first 25 million, are impossible , and Ryan L. Jones, and Gary Campbell has extended it to million. Of the first million, are impossible, a win rate of nearly A more difficult variant of FreeCell, as mentioned above, is to play with fewer than four freecells.
The deals below which require four freecells to win are: , , , , , , , , , , and A full list is in the list of difficult deals page. Based on analysis of the first 32, deals, we can also give some results for smaller numbers of freecells. It has been found, as a result of recent work by Shlomi Fish following earlier work by Danny A. Jones , that 25, of the first 32, deals are solvable and 6, are impossible.
The last of these to fall was number , which was intractable for quite a while but eventually proved impossible. Shlomi Fish and his colleague Jonathan Ringstad who provided computing resources and support at the University of Oslo have extended their analysis through the first , deals, finding , solvable and 82, impossible. Only deal number has still proved intractable.
More details are available in the September 2, posting on Fish's blog. Jones and Shlomi Fish and their solvers for these results. The win rate for zero freecells discussed in section 3 is about 0. The approximate win rates per deals for variant games with different numbers of freecells across top and columns down left are:.
White boxes with zeros indicate variants where no winnable random deals are known. Red boxes with asterisks have win rates less than 1 in 1, Blue boxes with At Signs have win rates greater than The lavender box with a double At Sign has a win rate greater than Violet boxes with exclamation points indicate that no impossibles have been found.
At least seven, it appears. All of the impossible deals in the first 10 million can be solved with five freecells, including of course I looked at a number of other constructed deals, including Hans Bodlaender's, the Microsoft joke deals -1 and -2, and others which have been posted at various websites and on Usenet newsgroups.
All of them are solvable with five freecells. I was beginning to wonder if all deals were solvable with five freecells, when Adrian Ettlinger sent me a deal he constructed, which appears to be impossible with six freecells as well as five confirmed with two different solvers.
The arrangement of suits and colors is particularly fiendish. You can play this deal in FreeCell Pro by copying the lines below into a file and using the Custom Game option:. This turned out to be wrong too: Tom Holroyd ran the FCPro deals known to be impossible with four freecells through his solver, and number turned out to be impossible with five freecells! This is the first known random deal to be impossible with five freecells it is solvable with six.
No other such deals have been found in searches through million deals. Note that has only 7 cards covering the aces.
Why is it so hard? Look at how many odd-numbered cards are at the bottoms of the columns, and how many of the even-numbered cards are clumped at the top. David A. Miller has worked on making even harder deals than Adrian Ettlinger's, and has constructed some deals which appear to be impossible even with seven freecells.
Here is one of his deals; Tom Holroyd's solver Patsolve says it is impossible, FreeCell Pro does not reach a conclusion:. Miller points out that a position can be reached, without filling any freecells, that requires ten freecells to solve. From the starting position below, move all 26 red cards to the homecells.
The resulting position, with 26 black cards, needs ten freecells to win. He also says that it appears that at least 37 freecells are needed so that no unsolvable position can ever be reached. With 36 freecells, a blocked position can be reached in which the bottom row consists of all of the aces and queens, and the second row all kings and twos each king covering an ace and each two a queen , and the other 36 cards are in freecells.
Here's his example; this is actually a zero-freecell deal which can be trivially solved in 23 moves if played correctly. Every good computer version of FreeCell allows the player to move a sequence of cards all at once using vacant freecells as momentary storage locations. This can also be done in related games of the Eight Off family. But in FreeCell and Baker's Game , where any card may be placed in an empty column, even longer sequences can be moved using a combination of empty columns and empty freecells.
For example, a four-card sequence can be moved with three empty freecells, but if there is also a vacant column, an eight-card sequence can be moved, putting the first four cards temporarily in the empty column using the freecells , then moving the other four cards to the destination using the freecells again , and finally moving the first four cards from the formerly-empty column to the destination using the freecells a third time.
Long sequence moves using empty columns as well as freecells have been called supermoves. The most common and useful supermove situation is moving a four-card sequence from one column to another when there is an empty column but only one empty freecell.
For example, if you want to move four cards from column 1 to column 2, with column 3 and freecell a empty, the sequence of moves one card at a time would be: 1a 13 a3 1a 12 a2 3a 32 a2. A move of this kind occurs at move 20 of the catalog solution to FC , and Richard Schiveley suggests that this is why so many people think the solution doesn't work -- if you are unfamiliar with supermoves, the move may look impossible, although Microsoft FreeCell carries it out with no difficulty.
FreeCell programs vary in their ability to use supermoves. The versions of Microsoft FreeCell, up through Windows XP, used supermoves correctly when there is one empty column and at least one empty freecell, but failed to make the maximum use of more than one empty column.
When there are no empty freecells, but multiple empty columns, it treats the empty columns as freecells e. FreeCell Pro works correctly in all supermove situations, but when recording moves, converts complex supermoves into a series of individual moves compatible with the original versions of MS FC the most common is a four-card sequence moved from a column to an empty column, when there is another empty column and one empty freecell. Strictly speaking there are 52! However, deals can be transformed in several ways which make no mathematical difference, which cuts down the number a bit.
The four left-hand 7 card columns can be interchanged in 4! Also, suits can be interchanged in certain ways. So there are permutations of columns including no swaps and 8 permutations of suits including no swaps , which reduces the number of essentially different FreeCell deals to roughly 1. The bit integers used in FreeCell Pro and other programs can in theory generate deals, but the algorithm used by Microsoft and compatible programs repeats halfway through FCPro uses a programming trick to get around this, and another trick to double this to ; it appears that these are all different.
The solitaire package Hardwood Solitaire III , which includes FreeCell among its games, actually allows in theory for any possible deal to be generated, but at the cost of having to enter a deal number of up to 68 digits.
I do not know if Hardwood's New Deal function can actually select every single possible deal. With plausible but careless play, it's possible though fantastically unlikely to have 13 cards left and lose. I have played hundreds of games. If FreeCell is the same game, I would be willing to work on this, except that in Seahaven Towers the games aren't numbered. Possibly the numbering has something to do with the initial deal? Ruchira Datta da FreeCell is certainly not the same as Seahaven Towers.
Terry Weissman has written an X version of Seahaven for which I wrote "autoplay" code. There are many Seahaven positions which are provably unsolvable. Among other differences FreeCell alternates colors, while Seahaven requires playing on the same suit. Hor" writes:. I'm willing to help. Steve Klassen st H- s g- p? OK, you got me interested.
Excuse my ignorance, but our news server has been down for a while so I don't know what FreeCell is. Can anyone enlighten me? Thanks, Jack van Rijswijck jav These are available on ftp. It is a very insidious, slowly but surely addictive game. You have been warned. FreeCell is NOT always winnable. Russell Turpin. Reply to author. Report message as abuse. Show original message.
Either email addresses are anonymous for this group or you need the view member email addresses permission to view the original message. As it says in its online help: FreeCell is a logic puzzle in the form of a solitaire card game. Robert Davies. As it. What you Failed to notice is that the setup you gave is NOT a random Setup, Indeed the odds of shuffling the deck and dealing that exact setup at the start of a FreeCell game are about e12 to 1!!!
I think that Microwofts estimate is sufficiently accurate don't you? Jarle Brinchmann. Seth Breidbart. Andrey Tsouladze. Russell Turpin tur Tim Smith. Gary Ritchie. An easy way to ensure that the game is always winnable would be to deal in reverse. Start with the cards in the winning position and randomly deal them to the playing field.
Perhaps this is how it is done? David Wayne Ring. Dave Joyce. See his original post below. Mark Shasby. Tom Haapanen. Axel Hecht. David Karr. Gareth Rees. Tom Haapanen to David Wayne Ring dwr Do any of : you remember the numbers for the really hard hands? Jeffrey Putnam. There are shareware versions of Baker's game, notably one called "Brain Jam".
Tom Horsley. Well, as long as this pointless thread keeps on going and going Matt Lih. Brad Aisa. Lenny Gray. Edmund H. David Charles Leblanc. Just pick a block and let me know. Dave Ring. Ruchira Datta. Charles Haynes. Steve Klassen. Jered Floyd. I'm willing to help too. But I just got FreeCell last night with my Watcom Dick Adams.
The first game which appears not to be winnable is Game Number. That is not a valid game number Try again. Appearance Options Close. Game Sounds Off On. Enable visual effects shadows, cards enlarging, buttons Off On.
Apply swinging card effect during the drag Off On. Advanced Options Use hardware-accelerated animations Off On.
Card Set Card Back Background. Back Select a Solitaire. Longest winning streak: 0 Longest losing streak: 0 Current streak: 0 Close. No more moves.
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