Freecell

"A strategy-heavy solitaire game without the tedium of shuffling, dealing, and futzing with cards"

I think I finally whipped my FreeCell addiction. I've got more sophisticated ones these days. But mine was fun while it lasted. The FreeCell card game is a relatively recent invention--you can read about its history more at the popular site freecell.org, as well as play randomly generated games there. The craze really started on Windows, though, and there are many reasons why I find FreeCell to be so impressive. Certainly it's convenient, as you don't have to mess with cards, but that doesn't make it a time-saver; it may eat up more time in the end because it's easier to get into a zone.

FreeCell, although theoretically easier to win than the old computer or manual versions of Klondike Solitaire(the loss rate is under .01% with best play, and only one of the predetermined 32000 games is unsolved) starts out almost impossible, unlike Klondike, where you quickly reach your maximum winning percentage. However, FreeCell is very chess-like in that you can see all the cards and plan combinations to keep your options open. You start out with eight columns of cards; four columns of seven on the left, four of six on the right. There are also four empty cells where you can put cards and a foundation where, as in Klondike, you want to put the cards in order, from ace to king. Once all the cards are in, you win. You may add a card to a row if it is one below and of the opposite color as the lowest card in the row(i.e. you can put a black seven on a red eight.) You can also move cards to empty rows as well as the cells.

Obviously getting an empty row or getting to an ace is desirable, and less obviously you want to expose as many low cards as you can first; the more that are at the bottom, the easier it may be to progress once you find an elusive ace. But the most intriguing part of FreeCell is when you learn clever combinations and how you can move a string of cards(i.e. J-10-9-8-7-6.) For instance, if you have two empty columns, you can move a chain of four cards from one column to another, but if you have two empty cells, you can only move a chain of three--learning these subtleties helps in big combinations where there seems no obvious way to expose a critical card. Then there are other finesses such as not putting a card into the foundation right away(i.e. if a 2 of hearts is on the board you may not want to put a black 3 into the foundation--if you did, the 2 might have to go onto an empty square later) or shifting a chain base from one card to another to get to the cards behind.

For people who enjoy puzzles without too much rigor, FreeCell is really a great choice. There's no time limit, and often you'll find yourself searching for the best way to use that final free cell(if indeed the game can be rescued) or kicking yourself for a readily apparent but wasteful move. And when you get out of a jam and spaces start opening up, it feels like your favorite team made a comeback in a sports event. For a change of pace, there will be a game you run into that you can't solve, and you can replay it continually until you beat it--each successive loss on replay doesn't affect your overall statistics.

Doing all this is actually not so bad as you do not have to point and click continually. The major drawback of Solitaire, the first Windows card game, is that you have to click on all the cards to put them into the foundation. FreeCell does a decent job of detecting this automatically if you check a certain box; this is unsurprising, as checking for it is not too hard, but it allows you to breeze through the end, which gets tedious after the first time, when you want to savor every moment of your strategic success. But even better, the game allows you to perform combinations without going through all the steps. What an idea! A computer cutting down on your busy work! For instance, if you want to move a chain of cards, it can detect whether its standard methods will allow the quick transfer, and all you need to do is to click on the column to move cards from and the destination column. The detection isn't perfect for larger column moves, and sometimes you'll need to move a few cards around before the computer can see that, yes, you do have a legal combination, but it is a feature that saves a lot of hassle. You can also use numbers to move the cards around; 1-8 highlight the rows, 9 highlights the foundation, and 0 highlights the free cells, cycling for when you want to move from them. So you can type in a whole game if you want, and it's a nice break when you're sick of your mouse.

Yet although FreeCell is convenient and challenging and fun, it's one example of why people who want a perfect product might complain about Microsoft. FreeCell hasn't exactly been refined. The home-brewed JAVA application whips Windows FreeCell for user-friendliness as it allows more extensive legal combinations, and even tracks your average time per game and offers new games(i.e. 10x6 as opposed to the standard 8x4.) Quite frankly, FreeCell is a neat and easy feature to use in Windows, and although you could expect mistakes in the first version, I'm irked they never managed to refine it; apparently this happens frequently on a larger scale in the OS. There are annoying pop-up boxes, that Windows specialty, for illegal moves(can't we have a status box instead? Please?) There are also nit-picks when clicking on a card and moving to the foundation; if you put the next heart to go in the foundation on the spade, it pops up ''illegal move'' and suspends play, especially annoying if you have a shaky mouse, as accidents happen. The window size also cannot be adjusted, which is annoying if you have something in the background, as you will miss a lot and click on the thing behind. You probably deserve this happening occasionally if you're at work, but it's a nasty interruption when you just want to concentrate on this specific mode of wasting time. It would also be nice to see an increase in the number of games you can choose to play(yes, some people have gotten through all 31999 that can be solved) or be able to determine how many cards in a chain to move to an empty cell; freecell.org's got it, the big corporation doesn't. I'm reminded here of a time eating at a family-run hamburger shack after years of McDonald's. One is done with a little more care, but the difference on your computer is that it's much less difficult to find the preferable virtual mom-and-pop joint.

Instead we got a new solitaire game with Windows Millennium, Spider Solitaire. It gives you a choice of how many suits to start a game(one, two and four i.e. okay, too tough and way too tough,) and the more suits, the tougher the game. It starts out like Klondike, with an upturned card in each row over a stack of face-down cards, but you have a double-deck of cards. Making a chain of same-suited cards at the column bottom from Ace to King causes them to disappear, and when you are stuck you have eight chances to pass cards out to the bottom of each column. Again it keeps stats but you get individual scores based on how many moves you made--the fewer the better. FreeCell is still more fun and stronger in overall concrete strategy, especially for people like me that like to see all the cards.

The graphics aren't exactly obtrusive although you wouldn't expect them to botch much here. The major advantage Solitaire holds over FreeCell is that you can view different backs of cards; however, FreeCell has this neat king in the top center whose eyes move back and forth as your mouse pointer zooms around. There are also no optional fireworks as in Solitaire, which is a pity, just a horribly pixelated and blown-up picture of a king.

The first person to computerize solitaire really opened Pandora's Box. Once the games became more convenient, and once there was a suitable graphics interface, there was really only the problem of programming the logic--which could be done with rudimentary C. Many back-parlor games were spit out on CD's that now fester in $4.99 eBay BUY 100 GAMES ON 1 CD L@@K auctions, and it all seemed very impressive. FreeCell seems to be the best of the lot, and having seen the original Apple version of solitaire(low-res graphics and very slow) it is impressive to see an easily accessible example of how computers can overhaul arduous tasks increasingly well.

I just hope writing this review and researching the details I wanted to verify doesn't cause me to slip again. I mean, there are so many other games to waste time on. Outside of work, at least. But overall there are worse ways to be (he says, donning his tin hat) frustrated or even brainwashed by Bill Gates. I confess I deleted the game from my hard drive at work and proceeded to wipe it from my computer. Although it is not creative and poetic, it is a legitimate brain-stretcher, but I've found it frightening how absorbing it is. Especially when you mix it with the occasional game of Mah-Jongg.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 01/13/02, Updated 01/18/02