The object of the game is to move all the cards to the home cells on the left side of the game board.
The four foundation piles must begin with Ace and end with King. In FreeCell, Aces are low and Kings are high.
On the right side of the game board are four free cells, temporary storage where you can store cards during play.
You can move cards from one column to another. Cards must be placed in descending rank and alternate color. Moving a stack of cards is the same as moving the cards individually. You can only move a stack of cards if there are enough free cells and empty columns.
The maximum number of cards that can be moved at once is the number of empty free cells plus one. This number doubles for every empty column, not counting the column you are moving the cards to.
The app offers settings to suit your playing style.
Tap to Move - Tapping on a card will move the card. You can always drag to move cards.
Auto Complete - The app moves cards to the foundation piles where possible after you have made a move. There are 2 auto-complete modes. In safe mode, cards are moved to the foundation while leaving enough cards to support sequential cards. In max mode, cards are moved to the foundation as soon as possible. By default, auto-complete is set to Off.
Level - The app offers 4 difficulty levels, Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, and Champion. Setting difficulty level does not change the current game but will affect the next game. When set to Random, games are randomly chosen without checking for difficulty.
Highlight Cards - Highlight cards that can be moved as a group.
Table - choice of color for the game board
Deck - choose between Compact and Antique cards
Sound - turn sound on or off
The app tracks scores with the goal of awarding more points for more challenging moves.
Moving a card to the foundation - If not all Aces are in the foundation, the number of points given is the rank of the card. Otherwise, the number of points given is the rank of the card minus the lowest rank in the 4 foundation piles.
Moving a card where it is the only possible move - 10 points
Move a stack of cards using all available free cells and empty columns - 10 points
At the end of the game, a bonus is added to the score based on the game level. The bonus is 0%, 50%, 100%, 150%, and 50% for Beginner, Intermediate, Expert, Champion, and Random respectively.
All FreeCell games in this app are winnable and a run of wins is called a win streak. The app tracks win streaks from all players and records the streaks on the Game Center leaderboard.
You can choose to enter a deal number and play that deal. Deal numbers follow Microsoft FreeCell numbering system which is popular with most FreeCell apps and websites. Wins and losses from playing numbered deals are not counted towards high scores or statistics as solutions for numbered deals can be obtained easily from many FreeCell websites.
Random games of each difficulty level are selected from the first 10 million deals, avoiding unsolvable deals. Of the first 10 million deals, 130 are unsolvable.