Computer implementations often show this motion, but players using physical decks typically just move the tableau at once.

In the June 1968 edition of Scientific American, Martin Gardner described in his "Mathematical Games" column a game by C. L. Baker which is similar to FreeCell, except that cards on the tableau are built by suit rather than by alternate colors.

Gardner wrote, "The game was taught to Baker by his father, who in turn learned it from an Englishman during the 1920s.

[2] Paul Alfille changed Baker's Game by making cards build according to alternate colors, thus creating FreeCell.

He implemented the first computerised version as a medical student at the University of Illinois, in the TUTOR programming language for the PLATO educational computer system in 1978.

For each variant, the program stored a ranked list of the players with the longest winning streaks.

There was also a tournament system that allowed people to compete to win difficult hand-picked deals.

[9] In 2012, researchers used evolutionary computation methods to create winning FreeCell players.

[10] A variant where card sequence movement is not limited by available cells is known as Relaxed FreeCell.

[2] Other solitaire games related to or inspired by FreeCell include Seahaven Towers, Penguin, Stalactites, ForeCell, Antares (a cross with Scorpion).

This implies that in constant time, a person or computer could list all of the possible moves from a given start configuration and discover a winning set of moves or, assuming the game cannot be solved, the lack thereof.

To perform an interesting complexity analysis, one must construct a generalized version of the FreeCell game with 4 × n cards.

However, some games are effectively identical to others because suits assigned to cards are arbitrary or columns can be swapped.