About Free Solitaire NZ

About free-solitaire.nz

free-solitaire.nz is a place to play patience for free, and a place to find out how the games really behave. Most solitaire sites tell you a game is "easy" or "hard" and leave it there. We wanted numbers, so we went and got them: we dealt well over a hundred thousand simulated games across the twelve games on this site, and we publish what we found, how we found it, and where our numbers could be wrong.

The site is run by Forty Media. You can reach us at info@free-solitaire.nz.

What you can play here

Twelve games, all free, all in your browser, with nothing to download and nothing to sign up for:

Every game has large, clear cards with a zoom control, a Hint button, unlimited Undo, Restart, Auto Play to finish a solved game, and drag-and-drop or tap-to-move. It works on a computer, tablet or phone.

Why a research site?

Because the honest answer to "can I win this deal?" is more interesting than people expect. A game of Klondike that looks hopeless often isn't; a game of Baker's Solitaire on this site very often is, because only a King may fill an empty column. We think knowing that makes you a better and calmer player. When you know roughly how often a game can be won, a loss stops feeling like a personal failing and starts feeling like information.

How our research was done

In September 2026 our team rebuilt each game as a computer program, using the rules taken from this site's own game code, and let it play thousands of numbered deals. We wrote the simulations in Python and ran them in parallel across the cores of one machine. Depending on the game we used up to three kinds of player:

  • a bot that sees only what you see and never uses Undo, which gives a floor;
  • a solver that is allowed to see every hidden card, which gives a ceiling;
  • an exhaustive search, where the game is small enough, which gives the exact answer.

Where a published figure exists we checked ours against it, mainly the peer-reviewed study by Charlie Blake and Ian Gent in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (2026). Our Baker's Game result under the classic rule came out at 76.0% against their 75.05%, and our Golf result without the King-to-Ace wrap at 44.0% against their 45.1%. That agreement is what gives us confidence in the figures they could not check for us.

Each game page ends with a step-by-step account of how that game was tested: the rules we used and any we had to assume, how many deals we ran, how the margin of error was worked out, and what the numbers cannot tell you. The Golf page and the FreeCell page are good places to start.

How we use AI

We used an AI assistant, Claude, made by Anthropic, to help write and review the simulation code and to draft pages on this site. The AI did not produce any of our figures. Every number comes from running the code, and the team checked the results against published research before anything was published. Where a result rests on an assumption about the rules, the page says so.

Our editorial standards

  • Numbers come with their method. We say how many deals, what kind of player, and give a 95% range rather than a single tidy number when the data calls for it.
  • Weak evidence is labelled weak. Some of our bots are simple. Where a bot result is only a lower bound, we say so rather than presenting it as how winnable a game is.
  • Outside figures are sourced and linked. We only quote published figures we can point you to.
  • Corrections are welcome. If you find a mistake, or know the game's rules differently, email us and we will check it and fix the page.

Articles and research pages are published under the byline Admin on behalf of the free-solitaire.nz team.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections or a deal that beat you and you'd like explained: write to info@free-solitaire.nz. How we handle information is set out on our privacy page, and the rules for using the site are in our terms.