Baker's Game

Baker's Game is the game FreeCell came from. C. L. Baker's version was described by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in June 1968, and it was reading that column that led Paul Alfille to build the variant that eventually shipped with Windows and took over the world.

The difference is one rule: columns build down by suit, not by alternating colour. That sounds like a detail and plays like a different game. Options roughly halve, the four cells clog quickly, and around a quarter of deals are simply unwinnable against FreeCell's near-certainty. It is the harder, older, less famous parent — and worth playing if FreeCell has stopped being a challenge.

The layout is FreeCell's exactly — 52 cards face up in eight columns, four of seven and four of six, with four single-card cells alongside and four foundations building up by suit from Ace. One rule differs: columns build down by the same suit rather than in alternating colours. A seven of clubs takes only the six of clubs, where FreeCell would accept either red six. Any card may fill an emptied column, though a stricter variant restricts that to Kings.

Suit-strict building roughly halves your options on every move, so the cells fill up much faster than in FreeCell and the margin for error is thinner. Plan longer: work out the full route for a buried card before you commit a cell to it, because there is far less chance of an improvised alternative appearing. Empty columns are worth more here than in FreeCell precisely because they hold a whole suited run rather than one card. The article puts solvability at 74.3% across ten million deals, so around a quarter of games genuinely cannot be won — a real difference from FreeCell, where a loss is essentially always your own.