FreeCell Solitaire (LittleJS Arcade)

FreeCell earns its long life the same way most great solitaire variants do: total information (no face-down cards to gamble on) and a set of rules simple enough to hold in your head after one game. Frank Force's LittleJS Arcade version doesn't dress that up with anything unusual — it's a clean, standard build of the classic, and the standard is what matters here.

Proving the drag actually works, not just watching it look right

Every card game on a touchscreen lives or dies on one mechanic: can a finger reliably pick a card up and put it down somewhere else. Screenshots of a dealt board don't answer that question, and neither does a drag that produces no console errors — the card could just as easily have silently failed to move at all. So this review went into the game's own source first, found the cardStacks array every pile is built from, and used it directly: pick a real card off a real seven-card tableau pile, compute its exact on-screen position from the game's own worldToScreen coordinate function (not a ruler on a screenshot), drag it to a confirmed-empty free cell, and read the same array again afterward. The result was unambiguous — the source pile dropped from seven cards to six, the target free cell gained exactly one, and that one card was, by value and suit, the exact card that was picked up. That's decisive proof on the simulated phone touchscreen.

Desktop needed a second look. A first attempt at the same drag, run through this review's usual held-drag testing tool, silently failed — the pickup registered but the drop never landed. Reading the engine's own input code showed why: it listens for mousedown and mouseup on document, and the standard touch-drag simulation this batch of reviews has used dispatches through Chromium's touch pipeline, which the desktop browser profile (correctly, deliberately) has switched off. That is a testing-tool gap, not a game bug, and it was confirmed as such the same way an earlier keyCode mismatch was confirmed in a different game this batch: by dispatching the real event type the game actually listens for. A synthetic mousedown → mousemove → mouseup sequence sent straight to document, with real gaps between each so the engine had a frame to notice, worked exactly as FreeCell's own code says it should — the picked-up card followed the mouse position precisely, and releasing it over the free cell dropped it there, confirmed again through the same before/after cardStacks check.

What's actually here

Beyond the confirmed-solid drag mechanic, this is unmistakably FreeCell: four free cells, four foundations, eight tableau columns, dealt correctly at the start of every game. Undo, redo, and restart are all present via icons above the board, which matters for a game whose whole appeal is being solvable through careful planning rather than luck. The presentation is plain — clear, readable cards on dark green felt — without the extra visual flourish some of this developer's other LittleJS Arcade entries carry, but plain is a reasonable choice for a card game whose job is legibility, not spectacle.

The verdict

FreeCell Solitaire doesn't try to be more than a correct, well-built version of a classic, and on that measure it succeeds. The one mechanic that could have quietly broken it — drag-and-drop card movement — was confirmed to actually work, on both a simulated phone and a real desktop mouse sequence, checked against the game's own internal state rather than assumed from a screenshot. For solitaire fans who want the real thing in a browser tab, this delivers it cleanly.