If you have found yourself, for some reason, playing freecell quest well... here's a guide. I threw it together in a few minutes so it's not super fleshed out but there's some good stuff in there, I hope.

If you have any questions before the year 2022 then feel free to leave a comment and I'll probably have this game fresh enough in my memory to answer.

The first thing the game asks you to do is to choose a character. This has a reasonably large impact on how the game goes. If you want to get through the game as fast as possible I recommend choosing the Ninja which gives +59% experience. The faster you level the faster you gain more HP/MP, and getting the free heals from leveling. You might say "why not just take a hero that gets more HP/MP" and my answer is this: By the time you get to mid game you have more than you need. Best to just rush to that mid-game power spike.

If you're really *not* good at free cell then taking the +mana character could be a good idea. The mana in this game is used to cast spells which essentially let you cheat. In the later game these spells are essential as the configurations are impossible to win without spells.

Don't take +gold. I ended the game with dozens of millions of extra gold + full archmage gear (the highest gear).

Don't take + Health, + healing, slower attacks, or + defense. All of this is negated by a single spell: fizzle

I'm not going to explain how to actually play the game of freecell -- just how to play this game.


When you start the game you have 1 free cell. If you click inventory > cards you'll see 4 decks of cards. Once those are full you can combine the cards to make another free cell!. Of note is that you can combine 2 cards that you have duplicates of to make a card you don't have. Use this SPARINGLY as there are a finite number of cards in the game. My rule of thumb would be to wait until you are down to 8 cards needed and then make a cell if you feel like you need it. If you're doing okay then the less cards you burn the better as those cards you burn will not be available for the next free cell. At the end of the game if you haven't burned too many cards you can have up to 6 cells total.

Which spells suck:
Heal (all of the heals are useless)
Magic Aura
Scramble
Glitch
Blood Storm
Black Plague
Water Breathing
Shroud

Which spells don't suck:
Undo
Impulse
Fizzle
Heroism
Epic Heroism
Kingslayer
Summon
Repulse
Teleport
Recall

If you have a hard sort or few stacks then here's the basic rotations

First off, always be right clicking. Right click sends all cards to the stacks that are eligible. In some cases this can be bad but 95% of the time it's what you want. For the other 5% there is undo.

How to deal with attacks
You get attacked in this game. The way to stop an attack is to make the top card in the attack animation movable. Sometimes this can mean making bad moves (sending unmovable cards to the free cells) in order to stop the attack then putting yourself in a weaker position. Here are the strategies I have used when getting attacked:

• Best case scenario is to in fact move the cards around to get the attack stack movable in a way that advances your board. Obviously this isn't always possible
  
• Second best scenario is to shove cards out of the way until you stop the attack -- then just undo the bad moves. This uses very little mana as Undo is 1 mana per undo
  
• The third best scenario to avoid an attack (and the most common) is simply to use the spell "fizzle" This spell stops all incoming attacks and is more mana efficient than healing.

How to decide what to do
Once you have Kingslayer: use it (some times moving queens/jacks around first can be helpful but if you're not seeing those moves then just use kingslayer)

The best quasi-hack I have found (that isn't straight up cheating) is to use the spell "Epic Heroism" to identify where cards are that are eligible to go to the stack. There is a spell (Magic Aura) that does this but it's strictly worse. A) magic aura costs 3 mana whereas epic heroism is free (unless you actually click on a card) B) The way in which magic aura highlights the cards is just harder to look at.

Actually use Heroism/Epic Heroism a lot. Heroism is a spell that sends a random eligible card to the stack. Epic Heroism lets you choose the card. When using Epic Heroism here is a solid thought process: First: check to see if you can send a card to the stack that will also allow cards in your free cells to go to the stack. If there aren't any moves that do that then send a card to the stack that will send cards on the bottom of the playing field up. If that fails then choose a card that's hard to get to. If those are all tied then lastly just pick the lowest card available.

There are two ways of cheating that I'm aware of. One of them is really more just quality of life and the other is straight up "why are you even playing this game"

Freezing time
This is the "why are you even playing this game" cheat. If you play in windowed mode and alt tab time will stop (i.e. you won't get attacked) but you'll still be able to see the cards. This is completely unnecessary with the spells that you're given! I never did this even in the hardest levels and was fine. Don't do this :O

Keeping Cities Liberated
The "story" of this game, if you will, is that you are liberating cities. As you traverse the map, sometimes a previously liberated city will become "under attack" again and you'll have to clear it. If you simply alt+f4 (or kill -9 in linux/mac) during the "under attack" proclamation then you can load up your save and that city will no longer be under attack. I did this several times as the game is PLENTY long as it is with over 500 hands to get through.