Today’s FreeCell deal
Everybody gets this board. Not a board of the same difficulty — the same fifty-two cards, in the same eight columns, wherever in the world they are playing. That is what makes comparing a result worth anything.
The deal comes from the date itself. Today’s date and the game’s name are combined into a number, and that number drives the shuffle, so your browser works out the same arrangement as everyone else’s without asking a server for it.
How it is scored
Moves, with time only breaking ties between equal move counts.
That is deliberate. Time mostly measures how quickly you can click, whereas a shorter solution genuinely means fewer wasted detours — you found a cleaner route through the same board. A careful solve in eighty moves beats a hurried one in a hundred and twenty, however long each of them took.
Autoplay sends up the cards that are provably safe, and those do not count against you.
What a good result looks like
FreeCell is unusual in being nearly always solvable, so finishing is a realistic aim on any given day rather than a matter of luck. Most deals can be cracked in well under a hundred moves once you have a plan; the interesting question is how much shorter you can get it than yesterday.
If a deal defeats you, undo is unlimited and the deal stays open all day — you can come back to it after lunch and pick up exactly where you left off.
Why FreeCell works as a daily
Because a shared puzzle has to be fair to everyone at once. FreeCell deals are solvable with overwhelming regularity, so nobody opens today’s board and finds an impossible one. The same cannot be said of Klondike, which is exactly why Klondike is not offered as a daily here — a shared deal that turns out to have no solution makes every score on that day meaningless simultaneously.
The streak
Finishing this keeps your site-wide streak alive for the day, and so does finishing any other daily. There is only one streak and it covers everything, so you are never obliged to play all of them — a few minutes on whichever game appeals is enough.
Miss a day and you can play yesterday’s deal to repair it, one day back only.
Every past FreeCell deal stays playable in the archive, because each one can always be regenerated from its own date. Nothing is ever lost or retired.
Looking for tactics rather than rules? The FreeCell strategy guide sits under the free play board, along with unlimited random deals to practise on.