Eight Off Solitaire

How Eight Off works

All 52 cards are face up from the first second: eight columns of six, and the four leftover cards start in four of your eight cells. Columns build down in suit — a 9♠ takes the 8♠ and nothing else. Each cell holds exactly one card, any card, any time there is room. An empty column accepts kings only (or a packed king-led run). Moving a packed in-suit run counts as moving its cards one at a time through spare cells, so the longest run you may move is empty cells plus one — with all eight cells free that is nine cards, with none it is one. That single line of arithmetic is the entire skill of the game.

Where Eight Off comes from

The in-suit branch of this family is the older one. Martin Gardner’s June 1968 Scientific American column described C. L. Baker’s cell game with in-suit building — and a decade later Paul Alfille, adapting it for the PLATO computer system, switched the building rule to alternating colors and called his version FreeCell. Eight Off is the in-suit game at full width: twice the cells, the classical kings-only rule for spaces, and the stricter suit discipline FreeCell relaxed. Play them back to back and you can feel the fork in the road: FreeCell spreads risk across colors; Eight Off concentrates it — each suit is its own private traffic jam, and the cells are the only overpass.

Nearly every deal is winnable. So why do people lose?

Across 1,000 random deals our solver proved winning lines on 977 — a 97.7% floor — proved none impossible, and simply ran out of its two-million-position budget on the remaining 23; those could fall either way, so 97.7% is the floor we can prove, not the total. The average best line banked more than 51 of the 52 cards. The honest answer to the second half: capacity mismanagement. Every loss in Eight Off is a story about cells that silted up — cards parked with no landing spot waiting, until the flat capacity rule (empty cells + 1) strangled every remaining supermove. The deal hands you four pre-parked cards precisely to start that pressure early. Winning is not about finding brilliant moves; it is about refusing to make the cheap one that costs a cell. Real human win rates will appear on our win-rates page once enough games are logged here.

Strategy: arithmetic before elegance

Before any dig, count it: freeing a card buried under k cards needs k spare slots — cells or legal landing spots — and every one you fill drops your supermove ceiling by one for as long as it stays full. So the doctrine is mechanical. Empty cells beat full ones: bank or place a parked card the moment a home exists. The four dealt cell cards are your opening project — each one you clear is permanent capacity gained. And treat empty columns as king-shaped: opening a lane with no king ready to claim it usually just moved your problem sideways. In-suit building means every card has exactly one home under it and one card that will ever sit on it — trace both before you commit.

Five habits that win more Eight Off games

Eight Off punishes clutter, not daring. These habits keep the arithmetic on your side.

1. Count before you dig: a card under k cards costs k slots to reach — if you cannot count them free right now, dig somewhere else.
2. Unload cells greedily: every parked card is minus one on every future supermove, and the interest compounds.
3. The four dealt cell cards come first — clearing them is pure capacity profit, and they start on the clock.
4. Never open a column without a king ready: an empty lane you cannot legally fill is a trophy, not a tool.
5. Bank with a glance at the suit below: in-suit building means the 6♦ you bank was the only seat the 5♦ will ever have.

Eight Off FAQ