KingCell is FreeCell's exact board — eight columns, four cells, all 52 cards face up — with two rules pulling hard in opposite directions. The tableau builds down by rank and ignores suit completely, so any 7 goes on any 8, including the 7 of the same suit. And an empty column will take nothing but a King. You can nearly always find a legal build; you can nearly never open a column to take advantage of it. That trade is the whole game. Free in your browser, no sign-up.
Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.
The loose build is a trap dressed as a gift. Everything moves, almost nothing progresses, and the discipline the rules used to impose has to come from you instead.
KingCell is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as an open FreeCell variant, and it is one of the shortest classes in the file: it declares a rank-based tableau stack with a King base rank and nothing else. There is no custom deal at all, so the board is FreeCell's exactly — eight columns, four cells, and the familiar five-rows-plus-two-partial arrangement. The collection also configures its solver with sbb='rank' and esf='kings', which is a second statement of the same two changes.
Suit-blind building is a recurring idea across solitaire and it is almost always paid for somewhere. Here the price is the King rule, and the two together produce a distinctive rhythm: the middle game feels unusually free, and the endgame is a long, careful unpicking of columns you were allowed to build too easily.
The same shape of problem appears elsewhere in this catalogue. Black Widow in the Spider family lets any descending run travel while still requiring single-suit sets to collect; Chinaman loosens Klondike's build to any suit but the card's own and pays with Kings-only spaces. In all three the lesson is the same — a rule that makes moving easy does not make finishing easier.
For the strict original, play FreeCell. For the same King rule with alternating-colour building and only two cells, play Bath; for four cells and Kings-only spaces on a wider board, Seahaven Towers.
One honest note on difficulty. PySolFC rates KingCell mostly skill, and no published win rate for it that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. Structurally it should be more forgiving than FreeCell in the opening and less so at the end, because the loose build lets you make mistakes that the foundations will eventually charge you for.
Yes. The tableau builds down by rank and ignores suit entirely, so the 7 of spades goes on the 8 of spades just as readily as on the 8 of hearts. Only the ranks are checked.
No, and that is the whole tension of the game. Foundations build up in suit from the Ace exactly as in FreeCell, so a tidy mixed-suit column in the tableau has to be taken apart before any of it can be banked.
Only a King, or a run headed by a King. This is the price the game charges for its very loose building rule, and it means an empty column is worth nothing until you have a King you can reach.
With four empty cells and no empty column, five. Each empty column doubles that, but the King rule makes empty columns rare — so five is usually your ceiling.
Easier in the opening and harder at the end. The suit-blind build means you can nearly always move something, but it also lets you build columns that will need long, careful unpicking before the foundations can take them.
Exactly as FreeCell's: eight columns, four of seven cards and four of six, all face up. KingCell changes no part of the deal — only the tableau build rule and the empty-column rule.