Move all 52 cards to the four foundations, building each suit up from Ace to King.
Przegląd
FreeCell is a patience game for one player with a single 52-card deck. Every card is dealt face up into eight columns, so nothing is hidden and almost nothing is left to luck: each deal is a puzzle you can think through from the first move. Four free cells, each holding one card, give you room to untangle the columns.
Przygotowanie
Shuffle one deck and deal it face up, one row at a time from left to right, into eight columns: the first four columns get 7 cards and the last four get 6. The cards overlap so every one can be seen. Above the columns are four empty free cells and four empty foundations, one for each suit.
Jak grać
- Only the last card of each column, the one not covered by another card, can be moved, and only one card at a time.
- Build the columns downward in alternating colors: a card may go on a card one rank higher of the other color, such as a red 7 on a black 8.
- Any card may be put into an empty free cell. A free cell holds one card, which can later move to a column or to its foundation.
- Any card, not only a King, may be put into an empty column.
- Each foundation starts with an Ace and is built up by suit to the King. Cards on the foundations stay there.
- An ordered run at the end of a column may move in one go when there is enough free space to shift it card by card: at most the number of empty free cells plus one, doubled for each empty column. A run moving into an empty column can't count that column.
- Nothing moves to the foundations by itself: you send each card up, by dragging or tapping it.
- Deals are not numbered here. Every game comes from a shuffled deck that is recorded, so it can be replayed.
Zwycięstwo
You win when all 52 cards are on the foundations. As soon as no sequence of moves can bring another card to the foundations, the game is over without a win, even if cards can still move. Every game also stops after 3,000 moves.
Wskazówki strategiczne
Warianty
Historia
FreeCell grew out of Baker's Game, a patience built down by suit that the mathematics writer Martin Gardner described in his magazine column in 1968, crediting C. L. Baker. In 1978 Paul Alfille changed the building rule to alternating colors and programmed the game, under the name FreeCell, for an educational computer system at the University of Illinois. It reached a far wider audience in the 1990s, when it came with popular home computers.