Play Seven by Four Solitaire — FreeCell With One Column Fewer

Seven by Four is FreeCell played on a narrower board. The same 52 cards, the same four free cells, the same alternating-colour building — but seven columns instead of eight, so three of them are eight cards deep. That sounds like a small change and it is not, because in this family a column is not just somewhere to put cards. It is a multiplier: the number of cards you can carry in one move depends on your free cells and your empty columns together, so losing a column costs you twice. Free in your browser, no sign-up.

How Do You Play Seven by Four?

Goal: build all four foundations from Ace to King by suit.

Setup

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck, all face up.
• Tableau: seven columns — three of eight cards and four of seven.
• Free cells: four, all empty at the start. Each holds one card.
• Foundations: four, empty. The Aces start buried in the deal.
• No stock, no waste, no redeal.

Rules

• Build tableau columns down in alternating colours: a red 7 goes on a black 8.
• A packed run travels as a unit, but only as far as your free cells and empty columns allow — the usual FreeCell arithmetic.
• An empty column takes any card or run. There is no King rule here.
• A free cell holds exactly one card, which may return to the tableau or go up to a foundation at any time.
• Foundations build up by suit from the Ace and are one-way.
• You win when all 52 cards are on the foundations.

Seven by Four Strategy

Everything is visible, so this is a planning problem rather than a guessing one — and the plan has to respect a board with less room than you are used to.

• Do the arithmetic before every big move. The number of cards that can travel together is (free cells + 1) multiplied by (empty columns + 1). With four cells and no space that is five; with four cells and one space it is ten. Knowing which of those you have decides whether a plan is possible at all.
• An empty column is worth more than a cell. A cell adds one to the first term; a column doubles the whole product. On a seven-column board that trade is sharper than usual, because you have one fewer chance to make it.
• Dig the eight-deep columns early. Three columns hold eight cards, and whatever sits at the bottom of them is the hardest thing on the board to reach. Find out what is down there before you commit your cells elsewhere.
• Keep at least one cell free. Filling all four turns the board rigid: with zero cells and no space, only a single card moves at a time. A cell holding a card you have no plan for is the most common way a winnable game becomes unwinnable.
• Do not bank low cards too eagerly. Foundations are one-way. A red 4 in play hosts either black 3; sent up it hosts nothing. Send it when a suit genuinely needs it, not the moment it becomes legal.

Seven by Four in the FreeCell Family

Seven by Four is registered in the PySol Fan Club collection as an open FreeCell variant, and its class is two short methods: build the game with seven rows instead of eight, and deal six full rows, then one more, then three cards to the first three columns. That is 52 cards in a 3 × 8 + 4 × 7 arrangement, and everything else — the alternating-colour tableau, the four cells, the spaces open to any card — is inherited from FreeCell unchanged.

The collection rates it SL_SKILL, a notch above the mostly-skill rating most of this family carries, and the reason is the arithmetic above rather than anything in the rules. FreeCell's difficulty has always been governed by how much room you have to manoeuvre, and this board takes away one of the two things that room is made of.

There is a sibling, Seven by Five, which is the identical board with a fifth cell. This catalogue does not carry it: two entries differing only by how many cells sit beside the same board is a setting wearing two names, which is the same reason Private Lane is absent from the Beleaguered Castle line.

For the original eight-column board, play FreeCell. For the same rules with a much harder deal, try Challenge FreeCell, whose Aces and twos are buried at the bottom of the columns. For a board where the build ignores suit entirely and only Kings fill spaces, play KingCell; for the tightest board in the family, Bath.

One honest note on difficulty. No published win rate for Seven by Four that we can find carries a method or a sample size, so this page quotes none. What is structural: everything is visible and nothing is random beyond the shuffle, so a deal that can be won can be won by careful play — there are simply fewer ways to get there than in FreeCell.