• Signing On
• Basic Play
• Moving Whole Columns
• Streaks
• Difficulty Levels
• Locate Card Function
• Keyboard Play
• Tips and techniques
• Saving your game
• Quitting a game
• Score keeping information
• NetCELL Chat

You may wonder why you are asked for a player name and a password before playing a game on your own machine. This is because NetCELL can keep track of your games and scores for you, letting you resume a game at a later time, or letting you compete against other NetCELL players out there on the net. It stores games and scores back on a central game server machine.

The player name you select need have nothing to do with your real identity. The password you select should not be an important password you use elsewhere. It serves only to keep someone else from entering the game using your player name. Of course, you may always play as "Anonymous", but then NetCELL will not be able to save games for you or store your streak.

The rules are quite similar to common solitaire rules. The object is to get all the cards moved up onto the ace piles at the top right of the screen. This is accomplished by moving cards from the main stacks onto other cards, into the "free cells" in the upper left on the screen, or by moving cards directly up onto the ace piles.

You start a move when you indicate a source by clicking on it with your mouse. A small blue highlight will appear above the column or cell you have selected. You then indicate the desired destination by pointing and clicking again. A magenta highlight will appear briefly over this destination location as the move is processed. You may also move single cards by pointing to the card and then holding down the mouse button and dragging the card to a new location.

As in common solitaire, cards may be placed on cards of opposite color and one higher in rank. Thus a two of diamonds my be placed on a three of clubs or on a three of spades. A jack of spades may be placed on a red queen, either the queen of diamonds or the queen of hearts. Kings may be placed only on open columns or in free cells (discussed next).

The area where NetCELL differs from regular solitaire is that four "free cells" are provided as temporary storage locations for cards. You may move any card from the bottom of a stack to an open cell. These cells are a key resource as they are used to let you move "strings" of cards from one stack to another. For instance, if you have a string consisting of a red four, a black three, and a red two and want to move it onto a black five on the bottom of another pile, your must have at least two open free cells. The red two must first be "parked" in a free cell, the black three in another, and only then may the red four be picked up and placed on the black five.

If that sounds tedious, it's really not. The computer is happy to figure out how to do that temporary "parking" of cards in the free cells for you. Thus, you would only need to indicate the column containing the 4-3-2 by clicking on it, and then click on the five you want to move them on to. The computer checks to be sure there are sufficient free cells and makes any necessary intermediate moves.

Of course you may still explicitly place a card in a free cell yourself. But be careful. Once you've filled up your free cells, further moves become much more limited if not impossible. If you get to a position where you have no further beneficial moves, you must quit the game, thereby losing the game and also any streak you may have attained.

If you've never played before, you might want to start out by selecting Easy Game from the main menu. This adjusts the deal so that on average the game will be easier to win. These easy games will not be scored however.

As alluded to above, it is common in Freecell to need to move entire columns of cards, sometimes in very complex ways. This is accomplished easily in NetCELL with the computer doing much of the work for you. To move an entire column to either an empty column or onto a suitable base card, simply click anywhere on the cards in the column you want to move. A blue bar will light up at the top of the column indicating that it has been selected. Then click on the destination column or any cards it contains. A magenta bar will illuminate atop the column showing that it has been selected as the destination. Then the computer will attempt to complete the move for you. If the move is legal, you will see the cards animate as they are moved to the new column. If the move is not legal, either nothing will happen or you will see a partial animation as the computer attempts the move.

Almost all games are winnable if you exercise a little patience and planning. Thus, the goal becomes not simply to win individual games, but to see how many games you can win in a row without tripping up. A run of wins is called a streak. People have attained streaks of hundreds of games!

NetCELL keeps track of streaks for all players who select a player name during sign on. Even if you quit your browser during a losing game, or power down your computer, NetCELL obstinately remembers your game and will not let you play again until you quit out of a loser. So be careful, use free cells cautiously, and we'll hope to see you on the Top 100.

Note: the average difficulty of the game will increase as your streak gets bigger. When your streak is small, the deals are biased to make the games a little easier. As your streak gets bigger the deals will approach a true random card distribution. Don't let the easy early games make you overly cocky as you get further along!

If you happen to explore the Custom option (or Specify Game option in the Java version), you'll find that you can specify both a game number and a difficulty level. The game number is a number in the range 0 to 32767 that uniquely controls the deal of the cards. The game number is shown whenever you win or lose a game.

The game numbers as shown on the win/lose screens are of the form:

        14622-6 

The number following the hyphen is the difficulty level of the game. This parameter is used to bias the deal algorithm to yield, on average, easier or harder hands. An easy level of play simply increases the likelihood that high cards will be dealt out first (buried) and lower cards like aces and deuces will be dealt out last so that they are more accessible. Note that this doesn't guarantee that games will always be easier or harder as expected. Distribution can still have a lot to do with the challenge of solving a hand. But on average you'll find it seems to work.

The difficulty level parameter affects the layout of the deal just as much as the hand number. Hand number 14622 played at difficulty level 6 will be a different hand than 14622 played at any other difficulty level. So it is important to note both the hand number and the difficulty level if you want to recall a hand for later replay.

The rules for scoring these hands are simple: if you explicitly specify the game number, the game will not be scored. This is to prevent someone from running up a big streak by playing the same game over and over again. If you select a random deal, however, but specify a difficulty level, it will check and see if that difficulty level is greater than or equal your current assigned difficulty level. If it is less than this value, the game will not be scored. If it is greater than or equal to that value, you will be given the option of having the game scored or ignored. It's up to you.

What's this "assigned difficulty level" stuff? The game is currently scaled so that when your streak is small, you are automatically given somewhat easier games. As your streak increases, the difficulty level will go up until at a streak of 50 you will be playing complete random deals (difficulty level 10).

A series of buttons are provided at the bottom of the screen to allow you to easily spot where specific cards are hiding. For instance, clicking on the A button will locate all the aces, flashing them in a highlighted color. Obviously, any cards which are already up in the aces piles and covered by other cards will not be visible. See below for keyboard shortcuts.

You can use the keyboard instead of the mouse to play if you prefer. As you become more experienced, you may find you can execute rapid sequences of moves more easily this way.

• Identify the main columns by using the number keys 1-8.
• Identify the free cells by using the lower case keys a, b, c, and d.
• Move a card up to the aces piles by selecting the source card and then hitting u or U. It will move it to the correct ace pile.
• Locate cards by holding shift and pressing A, 2-9, T, J, Q, or K.
• Save your game by pressing upper case S.
• Give up the current game by pressing upper case G.

The most important thing to remember is to be careful to not fill up your free cells. This can not be stressed enough. Without open cells, you are dead in the water.

As you play, you will want to glance up at the ace piles to see what the lowest cards are that are still out. If you have all your twos up except the two of diamonds, you might want to make it a priority to extract that two.

One other word of warning: you may be tempted to move cards up to the aces any time you can. This can be unwise. Moving a black four up to the aces piles while you still have red threes in play on the board may lead you into a sticky situation later as you look around for some place to put one of those red threes.

One interesting effect that you should be aware of is that having an open column provides a considerable increase in the size of string you can move from one column to the next. This is because the computer can use this open column as an additional "parking" area during long string moves. An open column dramatically amplifies the number of cards you can move by functioning not just as an additional free cell-- unlike the free cells, it can store whole strings, not just single cards.

When in doubt, NetCELL saves your game for you anyway. If you leave the NetCELL web page, any game in progress is remembered. If you close your browser, turn off your computer, unhook your network connect, it's still the same. The game is stored move by move at the central server so it's always right there when you come back.

However, a Save button is provided at the bottom of the screen to allow you to explicitly save your current game. This is a polite thing to do if you'll be away from the game for a while since it frees up your slot at the server. It also is handy for keeping those game times down. Otherwise, all that idle time is being tallied up and added to your overall average game time.

A Give Up button is provided at the bottom of the NetCELL board. When you've gotten yourself into a situation from which there is no escape, use this button to acknowledge the loss. Otherwise, your losing game will be saved indefinitely. Quitting a game of course also causes you to lose any streak you may have built up, so be sure it's really a lost cause before you reach for the button.

There are a few things that you might want to know about how we track scores for all the individuals who play here.

First of all, inactive user records are scrubbed after a few months based on the size of the best streak they managed. A best streak of 50 in some variant will never expire. Wanna preserve your record forever? Go win 50 10x6s real quick.

On the All Time scores list, streaks never expire (except when we had some data loss problems a few years ago.)

On the Current Streak scores list, expiry works like so:

• If you're in a game for more than 7 days but haven't logged on, you're assumed to be in a stuck game that you haven't gotten the guts to quit out of and are removed from the current listings. If you get back on and win tho, you're back up of course.
• If you're not in a game but haven't been on for a month, your streak will disappear from the Current Streaks. Of course if you get back on and play, you go right back up.

Why are we so aggressive about cleaning up streaks? Answer: we have to be. If folks all over the planet who are actively playing are going to have any hope of getting on the scoreboard, we have to clean up the stale stuff from folks who've quit playing or who have changed player names.

Yes, amazingly enough there's a lively chat environment associated with our little Freecell game. Here's a little info about this whole other world to get you started:

Chat Tricks
Chat Map