History of FreeCell

In 1978, Paul Alfille was a medical student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Like many students of the era, he spent time on the PLATO system — a groundbreaking educational computer network that also happened to host some of the world's earliest computer games. Alfille was a card game enthusiast looking for a solitaire variant that relied on strategy rather than luck.

Most solitaire games deal some cards face-down, meaning your fate partially depends on what you can't see. Alfille wanted to eliminate that hidden information entirely. His solution was elegant: deal all 52 cards face-up across eight columns, and provide four temporary storage spaces — the free cells — where any single card could be parked while you rearranged the tableau.

The result was a game where every deal (or nearly every deal) has a solution, and finding that solution requires genuine strategic thinking. No blaming bad luck. No praying for a helpful card to turn over. Just you, 52 visible cards, and your ability to plan ahead.

Alfille programmed FreeCell in the TUTOR language, which was PLATO's native programming environment. The game spread across PLATO's network of terminals at universities and military installations, earning a small but passionate following. For the next decade, FreeCell remained a niche game known primarily to people who had access to PLATO terminals.

Among the original 32,000 numbered deals in Microsoft FreeCell, game #11982 holds a unique distinction: it is the only deal that has been mathematically proven to have no solution. Every other deal — all 31,999 of them — can be solved with the right sequence of moves.

The story of how we know this is itself remarkable. In the mid-1990s, a volunteer effort called the Internet FreeCell Project set out to solve every single one of those 32,000 deals. Organized by Dave Ring, the project coordinated thousands of players worldwide. Volunteers would claim game numbers, attempt to solve them, and report back. By the late 1990s, every deal had been solved except #11982 — and a handful of others that would eventually fall to more advanced solving techniques.

Computer scientists later confirmed what human players suspected: deal #11982 is genuinely impossible. Exhaustive search algorithms explored every possible sequence of legal moves and found that every path leads to a dead end. No matter how brilliant your strategy, this particular arrangement of cards simply cannot be untangled.

Interestingly, eight other deals were long thought to be unsolvable: #146, #455, #495, #512, #530, #1941, #6182, and #8591. As solver algorithms improved over the years, solutions were found for all eight. Some required over 100 moves and extremely precise play, but they were all technically winnable — making #11982 the sole holdout.

Want to try your hand at the impossible? You can play Game #11982 here and see for yourself why it defeated every human and computer solver. Or try some of the notoriously difficult (but solvable) deals like #169 or #178.

FreeCell's impact extends far beyond the game itself. As one of the three card games bundled with Windows (alongside Klondike Solitaire and Minesweeper), it became a shared cultural experience for an entire generation of computer users. In the 1990s and 2000s, FreeCell was often the first game people played on a new computer.

In the workplace, FreeCell became synonymous with office downtime. IT departments joked about removing it from company machines, and more than a few managers walked past employee screens showing suspiciously quick Alt-Tab reflexes. A 2003 survey estimated that American workers collectively spent billions of hours per year playing Windows card games.

FreeCell also served an unexpected educational role. Microsoft originally included card games with Windows to help users learn mouse skills — particularly drag-and-drop operations. For many people in the early 1990s, moving cards around in FreeCell was their first experience using a mouse to interact with objects on a screen.

The Internet FreeCell Project (1994–2000) was a pioneering example of crowdsourced problem-solving. Years before Wikipedia or citizen science platforms, thousands of volunteers coordinated online to systematically solve all 32,000 Microsoft FreeCell deals. The project demonstrated that large-scale collaborative efforts could accomplish what no individual could do alone.

Today, FreeCell remains one of the most popular solitaire card games in the world. Its appeal hasn't faded because its core design is genuinely excellent: perfect information, deep strategy, and the satisfying knowledge that nearly every deal is solvable if you play well enough. Whether you first discovered it on a PLATO terminal, a Windows 95 desktop, or a modern browser, the game is the same — and that timelessness is its greatest achievement.