FreeCell
It remembers which deal you cleared, not just how many.
It remembers which deal you cleared, not just how many.
Nearly every FreeCell app shows you statistics. 1,284 played, 812 won, 63%. The numbers keep growing and remember nothing.
Which deal was it you lost half an hour to last week? Have you seen the one in front of you before, and how did it go? There is nowhere to ask. A game ends, one percentage nudges, and that is that.
But FreeCell deals have numbers. They have for thirty years, and #617 lays out today exactly as it did then. The number was always there and no app was keeping it, so I built one that does.
No subscription, no account. Deal #1 lays out exactly the way it did in 1992, and so do the other 31,999.
Very hard, beside the deal number, is what the app found by playing this deal out in the background. You know before you start. The line under it is how many times you have opened this deal and how it went.
The number under the board is how many cards you can move right now. Moving a run is really the app carrying cards one at a time through your free cells and empty columns, so the number falls as those fill up.
Everything is kept by deal number. Open that number's row and it reads:
#617 · Very hard · 3 attempts · best 97 moves in 8:41 · no undo
Lost twice, cleared on the third try, and never undone that time. Open #617 again and this line sits above the board. You end up playing against your earlier self on the same deal.
And the number is not private to your phone. The app shuffles the way the original FreeCell did, so #617 is the same deal on anyone's phone. Send a friend a number and they meet the exact layout you saw.
Deals cleared, win rate, the run of days you are on now, and a calendar of the days you played, all in one place.
The calendar is the point of this screen. What hangs on a date is not how many you played on Tuesday but which ones, so you can go straight back to the number you were stuck on three days ago.
Deals 1 through 32,000 are everything this app deals — exactly what the first FreeCell shipped with. Records holds a map of every one of them, a dot per deal: gold for cleared, faint for played, empty for untouched. It starts blank and ends up looking like a star chart.
It counts your ground, too — how many hundred-deal stretches you have finished, and how few are left in the one you are closest to. Tap that stretch and it opens the next deal in it.
One deal in there cannot be won at all. It is #11982, it sits on the map as a single red dot, and the app tells you before you open it.
"812 cleared" and "34 very hard deals cleared" are different sentences, and the second one needs a grade on every deal. So I made the app play each one out in the background — three times, three different ways — counting how much backtracking it takes. The middle answer is its grade. Easy, Normal, Hard, Very hard.
Half of all deals come out Easy. That is not a soft yardstick, that is just what FreeCell is. One in six lands above Hard, and one in twenty-five is Very hard. So when you clear one of those, it really was one.
Other apps stop at "every game is winnable." In FreeCell nearly every game is winnable, so that sentence tells you nothing. Ask this one for a brutal deal and it goes and finds you one.
Everything someone new to FreeCell needs is on one card. Nothing to page through, nothing to skip, and it reopens from the menu whenever you want it.
It is also where you find that holding a card before you let go shows you where it would land, and that dragging one lights up every spot that can take it.
You usually lose FreeCell by making one bad move long before you notice, and the game ends without ever telling you which one it was.
So ask. The app walks back through your moves, finds the last position from which the deal could still have been won, and offers to take you there. The deal stays in your records either way, and you can open it again another day.
Free. No subscription, and nothing to buy.
Your games and your records stay on the phone. No account. To see how the app gets used it sends the name of what happened and a few numbers — which deal you opened, whether you cleared it, in how many moves and how long. The privacy policy says exactly that.
iPhone, iOS 15 or later. English and Korean.