Card Games and Solitaire
One of the thirty-two thousand numbered FreeCell deals cannot be won. Every other one can, which makes losing entirely your fault.
36 games · hand-picked, then filled from the catalogue
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There is exactly one FreeCell deal in the world that cannot be won, and it has a number.
How this list is put together
Microsoft's original FreeCell shipped with 32,000 numbered deals, and for years people worked through them looking for one that was impossible. Deal number 11,982 is the one. Every other deal in that set has a solution, which is a remarkable thing for a card game to be able to say: in FreeCell, a loss is never the shuffle's fault. It is always yours.
That single fact is the best way into this whole shelf, because it separates the two things people mean by «card game».
Games against a shuffle, not against a person
Everything on this page is patience — solitaire, in the American sense. One player, one deck, and an opponent that is nothing more than the order the cards happened to come out in.
Klondike is the one everybody pictures: seven columns, four foundations, and the question of whether you turn one card or three. One card is a much easier game and most browser versions quietly use three.
Spider uses two decks and a hundred and four cards. At one suit it is nearly always winnable; at four suits it nearly never is. The rules do not change between them — only the number of colours — and that is the cleanest demonstration in card games of how much difficulty comes from information rather than from rules.
FreeCell puts every card face up from the start. Nothing is hidden, so nothing is luck, which is why the 11,982 story exists at all.
TriPeaks and Pyramid are the fast ones: no columns to manage, just a shape to dismantle, and a game that ends in two minutes rather than twenty.
What is not here
No poker, no betting, no casino. Anything tagged that way is excluded from this page by rule, not by oversight — a game where the point is the wager belongs to a different industry and we do not carry it.
And no trick-taking games with other people. The card games people play against somebody — whist, bridge, the national games every country has its own version of — are almost absent from free browser catalogues, ours included, because they need opponents and a rules engine rather than a shuffle.
A median of 7.4 MB across the thirty-six here, against 7.8 for the catalogue. Six are marked for touch, which is oddly few for a genre whose entire input is dragging one card onto another.
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Is FreeCell really always winnable?
Almost. Of the 32,000 numbered deals in Microsoft's original version, exactly one has no solution: number 11,982. Every other deal can be won, which makes FreeCell the only patience where losing is entirely your own doing rather than the shuffle's.
Klondike with one card or three?
One card wins far more often, because you see the whole stock instead of a third of it. At three, the order of the cards stops being a choice you can influence. When a game does not say which it is using, it is almost always three.
How many cards does Spider use?
Two decks, a hundred and four cards. That is double Klondike, and it is why a game takes three times as long and why a mistake is paid for twenty moves later. One suit is nearly always winnable; four suits nearly never is. It is the same game.
Are poker and betting games here?
No. Anything tagged casino, slot, poker or betting is excluded from this page on purpose. What is here is patience — the games you play against a shuffle rather than against a pot.
How big are they?
A median of 7.4 MB across the thirty-six, against 7.8 for the catalogue. Six are marked for touch, which is low for a genre whose entire input is dragging a card.