Strategy from Solitaire: 3) Freecell
The game shown is from Microsoft Solitaire’s daily challenges, August 2, 2023.
Would challenges be easier without surprise events from others? The game, Freecell, demonstrates that they aren’t. It is a combination of Klondike and Pyramid without the surprises from the turn of a card. Freecell adds a different dose of strategic reality: limits on how much we can move at any one time.
Like Pyramid, this game represents competitive situations where the ground has been well-explored, and the environment is unpleasantly stable. “Unpleasantly” because we miss change as the source of new opportunities.
Mission, Ground, and Climate
All strategy needs a Mission (see this article). The mission in Freecell is the same as Klondike, to get the cards from the playing field, up into the scoring area, the Foundation, the four spaces with the suits in the upper right. The first card that goes on each of these slots are the aces. Missions can be to get a certain number of a specific card or solve the entire board. The mission is shown at the top of the screen.
The Ground is the playing field, the Tableau. Unlike any game so far, it shows all the cards of the deck. Since all the cards are shown, this game’s lesson is that knowing more makes the problem more complex not easier. As we saw in Pyramid, seeing and understanding are two very different things. We can still not see the future, that is, how the board will look after a series of our own moves.
Only the eight cards at the bottom of each column are uncovered initially and playable. Cards that are moved to the four blank spaces called “free cells” in the upper left are also playable. Unlike Klondike, however, cards played to the Foundation are resources that have been “used” and can’t be moved back to the columns.
Like Klondike, these ground resources are eventually organized into “hierarchies,” society’s organizations. Unlike Klondike, when one of the eight columns is emptied, any card or existing hierarchy can be moved there. This is like real life because any of us can move our strategic position. Like Klondike, kingdoms must be built out of complementary opposites, opposite colors.
Like gods, we are the Climate in this game. We make all changes ourselves. We are arranging a complex puzzle with fifty-two pieces. This game teaches the difficulty of problem solving in a complex, but stable, situation.
Methods
In Klondike we can move all the cards in a hierarchy at once, no matter how big that hierarchy is. In Freecell, the biggest hierarchies can never be moved at once. All such moves are limited by the number of available, that is “free,” cells. All moves require resources, in this game, the free cells. We start with four free cells, so a maximum of five cards can be moved. The four lower cards go to the free cells. The one top card is moved to its new position. The four lower cards are then put onto the top card, freeing the cells again. Since we often must remove a card without playing it somewhere soon, free cells are filled. If we have only one cell left free, only two cards can be moved at once. This represents a strategic reality: big organizations cannot move as easily as smaller ones.
Like Pyramid, this game teaches us about the limitations of planning and the value of experimentation. We can see all the cards, but we can quickly understand only the implications of moving five cards as a time. To go further, we must move the cards and see the new situation. We create the future, but we cannot see the results of our actions until we have made them. In practice, we must often undo our moves when we hit a roadblock. After playing tens of thousands of games of Freecell, I have never played a game that cannot be won, but no difficult game can be won without having to undo my mistakes.
Since we cannot move big hierarchies, the strategy of the game is to move the aces to the foundation as soon as we can. This allows us to shrink our hierarchies or our columns by playing the lowest cards onto aces, starting with the twos. The valuable lesson here is that we must get rid of our organization’s weakest workers, products, and so on to stay agile.
I picked a simple game to show some obvious moves. In the game above. removing the ace of diamonds allows us to remove the two, three and four of diamonds as well. The ace of hearts is then removed followed by the four of diamonds. Then, we can move the king of diamonds to a free cell to free the ace of spades, but we can only remove a king from a free cell by putting it into an empty column since there is no higher card on which it can be played. So, this move comes with a steep cost, 25% of our moving capacity. Since we are a long way from emptying a column, we should avoid such moves at this stage.
The game shown is a very easy one. This allows us to look at it and try to plan our moves. Try in see how far you can get.
Most minds, including my own, do not have the capacity to see very far into the future. Our planning is always wrong, and it is slow. As with Pyramid, the fastest way is to work through the tableau until we are stopped. We can see how difficult these puzzles can get by playing an expert-level game. To win it, we must undo our moves many times. I have never played a game of Freecell I haven’t been able to solve but solving any of them would be impossible without the “undo” button.
In our lives, we often find ourselves in a future situation that is a dead end. We then must undo our past decisions if we can, admitting we were wrong, and that our plan didn't work. This is an important lesson in humility. Our experiments must fail in order to show us where the correct path lies.
Conclusions
This game is a real eye-opener for those of us who think that, with more information about our situations, we can find solutions to problems more easily. More information makes the problem more complex for our limited minds, not easier.
As with all solitaire games, the important element of working with and against others is missing here. A multi-player version of Freecell might teach more methods of strategy, perhaps with players competing to build up their position with the ability to negotiate agreements to help one another in certain situations.