Why is FreeCell so popular?
“Freecell Ruined My Life…it frequently kept me up until 1.30 in the morning. Sometimes I was going to bed and I could hardly see”
FreeCell is a solitaire 52-card game with “no stunning graphics, no sound and a workmanlike game engine”. But for sheer addictive compulsion and appeal, it deserves a place in the hall of fame.
FreeCell’s origins may date back to 1945 and a Scandinavian game called “Napoleon in St. Helena”. Various versions of the game were developed between 1968 and 1977 but the game remained relatively obscure until it was made a part of Windows 95 and has been included with every version of Windows since.
So why did FreeCell become so addictive? The original Help file remains through modern Microsoft versions: “It is believed (although not proven) that every game is winnable.”…Most solitaires (including the most popular ones like Klondike, Spider, Pyramid, Forty Thieves, and Miss Milligan) can be won less than half of the time even with perfect play. Almost every FreeCell deal can be won if played correctly; it has one of the highest win rates of any solitaire.
The original Microsoft FreeCell package includes 32,000 games, known as the “Microsoft 32,000”. When FreeCell became very popular during the 1990s it was not clear which of the 32,000 deals in the program were solvable. To clarify the situation, Dave Ring started The Internet FreeCell Project, took on the problem to try to solve all the deals using human solvers.
The project was finished in October 1995, and only one game defied every human player’s attempt: #11,982, which has been shown to be unsolvable by several exhaustive-search software solvers.
