Eight Off Solitaire: eight cells, one deck, and nearly every deal can be won

Eight Off is a FreeCell-style game with a twist in each direction. You get eight free cells instead of four, which sounds like a gift, but four of them start the game already holding a card, and you can only build down in the same suit. The result is a calm, open game where everything is visible and almost everything is possible, provided you don't clog those cells.

How possible? We ran 10,000 shuffled deals through a solver using this site's rules. It won 99.89% of them. Only 11 deals in 10,000 were proven impossible. For a casual player, that means a lost game of Eight Off is almost always a game that could have been won.

Eight Off at a glance

Because every deal was settled one way or the other, 99.89% is a precise answer to "how many Eight Off deals can be won?" on this site. We didn't measure a casual-player floor for this game.

Eight Off rules, as dealt on this site

• One deck. 48 cards are dealt face up into eight columns of six. The last four cards go into four of the eight free cells.
• Building: down one rank in the same suit only. A 7 of clubs goes on the 8 of clubs and nowhere else.
• Empty columns accept only a King, or a run starting with a King.
• Moving runs: you can move a same-suit run in one go, up to the number of empty cells plus empty columns plus one. Longer runs have to wait until you've made more room.
• Foundations build up by suit from Ace to King.

Why a winnable game still gets lost

The four starting cards take half your space

You begin with only four empty cells, not eight. Getting those four starting cards out of the cells early is what turns Eight Off from cramped to comfortable.

Same-suit building is strict

In FreeCell a black 8 can take either red 7. Here, each card has exactly one home in the tableau. That's why cells fill up faster than people expect.

Kings block the empty columns

Only a King can go into an empty column, so a column you've cleared stays useless until a King is free to move into it. Plan which King will go where.

Low cards can hide at the top of a column

In about a third of our deals, no Ace was playable at the start. The first job in those games is digging one out.

Habits that keep Eight Off easy

1. Look at the four starting cells first. In 28% of deals one of them holds an Ace. Play it at once and you've got a free cell straight away.
2. Empty the starting cells before you fill new ones. Every card you move out of a cell is room you can use later.
3. Follow each suit down. Find where the next card of a suit is, and whether you can reach it without filling a cell.
4. Clear a column only for a King that's ready to move, ideally one with a run behind it.
5. Keep two cells empty whenever you can. With two spare cells, you can shuffle a short run from column to column.
6. Undo instead of starting over. With fewer than 1 in 100 deals impossible, the answer to a stuck game is usually one move you'd make differently.

How a typical game unfolds

A good Eight Off game usually starts by emptying the four pre-filled cells, one card at a time, onto their same-suit homes or the foundations. Once the cells are clear, you work down each suit in turn, using two or three cells to lift cards out of the way. The turning point is often the first empty column with a King moving into it: after that, long same-suit runs form and the foundations fill quickly. If you reach a point where all eight cells are full, stop and undo a few moves, because the game is nearly always still winnable from an earlier position.

What's on this page

Eight Off is free, with no download and no account. Big, readable cards with a zoom control, Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart, Auto Play and drag-and-drop or tap-to-move are all here. The game tracks wins, time and moves, and you can mute the sound, go fullscreen or change the table color. It runs in any modern browser on computer, tablet or phone.

The research behind these numbers, step by step

The play-solitaire-free-online.us team at Solitairen OOD ran this study in September 2026.

1. Rules from our game code. This site's FreeCell engine has an "eightoff" setting: eight columns of six, eight cells with four pre-filled, same-suit building, Kings only in empty columns, and run moves limited to empty cells plus empty columns plus one.
2. Rebuilding the game. We extended our FreeCell program to Eight Off's rules.
3. Numbered deals. 10,000 deals, every one built from a numbered seed, so the same test can be run again card for card.
4. The player. A solver that sees every card, as you do in this game, and explores the most promising position first, with only provably safe automatic moves to the foundations. It had up to 200,000 positions per deal.
5. Running it. Every one of the 10,000 deals was decided: 9,989 won and 11 proven impossible.
6. Published comparison. Blake & Gent (2026) give 99.8805% for Eight Off, but with one card moved at a time. We ran that stricter rule too, on 10,000 deals: 99.80% solved and 0.14% proven impossible (95% range 0.08–0.24%). Their implied 0.12% impossible sits inside our range, so the two results agree. This site's run moves add only a tiny amount, taking us to 99.89%.
7. Margin of error. The solved share of 99.89% has a 95% range of 99.80% to 99.94%.
8. Limits. The solver sees every card, just as you do, but it plays perfectly and never gets tired. Your own win rate depends on how carefully you use the cells.

The code behind the test

Eight Off is handled in freecell2.py, written in Python 3.11 using only the standard library. The solver is a best-first search: it scores each position by the cards still off the foundations and the cards stacked on lower ones, always expands the best one, and keeps a table of positions it has seen so it doesn't repeat itself. A shared runner spread the 10,000 deals over 19 worker processes on a 20-core machine; the site-rule run took under a minute. Percentages come with Wilson 95% intervals.

An AI assistant, Claude by Anthropic, helped us write and check the solver and draft this page. The figures didn't come from the AI: they come from running the solver, and we checked them against the published study above.

By Admin, play-solitaire-free-online.us (Solitairen OOD). Research dated September 19, 2026.

Questions new players ask

Will Eight Off feel easier than FreeCell to a casual player?

Both are winnable almost every time. Eight Off gives you more cells, but its same-suit rule and Kings-only empty columns make those cells fill faster, so it plays differently rather than easier.

Why do four cells start with cards in them?

That's how Eight Off is dealt: 48 cards go into the columns and the last 4 into the cells.

Which cards are allowed into a cleared column in Eight Off?

No, only a King or a run starting with a King.

How many moves does a game take?

The solver's winning lines averaged about 35 moves. People usually take more, because we try things and undo them.

Where should an Eight Off player go next?

Try FreeCell for the classic version, or Baker's Solitaire, which also builds in suit.