A History of Freecell

There are dozens of variations on solitaire, but one of the most popular must be Freecell.

Included in every single version of Windows since the mid-90s, it’s fair to say that it’s been seen by a lot of people. That’s especially true when you compare with other, rarer variations. How many people do you know who play Kings in the Corner?

But how did Freecell become one of the go-to versions of solitaire? Interestingly, it’s not as obvious as it seems.

History of Freecell

The truth is that Freecell is relatively recent game. It’s less than 100 years old, as it is played today. Compare that with card solitaire – Patience – which has its origins more than 300 years ago.

Today you can play Freecell solitaire online, download apps for your phone or, yes, play it with Game Pass. That’s quite a rise in less than a century.

Freecell is similar to Eight Off, which itself became Baker’s Game. Like Freecell Eight Off gives you spaces to move cards – unsurprised the player is given eight gaps. Using those gaps, they must organize the upturned cards to make four piles of completed suits, ranging from ace to king.

Baker’s Game is even more similar to the game we know today. The board is exactly the same, except the bulk of the game is played with suits instead of alternating colors. Freecell offered up that final change.

How much these other games influenced Freecell directly is up for debate. What we do know is that in 1978 the first computerized version was programmed into Plato educational machines.

This became a precursor to its inclusion in Windows. Jim Horne learned it from Plato, and included it as a test program within Windows. It was released a couple of times for the platform before being included in Windows 95. It has been in every version of the operating system since then.

Solving – Computers and Community

And like every other popular video game, Freecell began to build up a community. And the community did what all communities do – they start trying to break the thing they love.

One group decided they wanted to work out exactly how many of the included 32,000 deals were actually solvable within Microsoft’s Freecell were. Hundreds of volunteers played the games, with ones marked as unsolvable sent on to other players to work out.

In the end, only one game ended up being completely unsolvable. The Internet Freecell Project finished its work in October 1995, with only game 11,982 defying anybody’s efforts to solve it.

Elsewhere, fans of the game decided they wanted to teach computers how to solve Freecell. A number of digitized Solvers popped up, each using the latest technology to finish games quickly and without human interaction.

All this goes to show the love for Freecell that has developed over the years. Although it’s “just a card game”, it is a popular video game from the 90s in its own right. And how many big titles from that era can still claim thousands of players each day?