Or: I Learned To Play Solitaire At Nearly Age 34, Then Immediately Quit, Spit On Its Grave, And Declared It A Foolishness
Something that's important to know about me - and probably pretty hard to miss - is that I never did most things.
Was up all night playing freecell.
If, like me, you began your freecell journey with this post, here's something I was confused on but makes sense now: the limit to how many of an ordered stack you can move at once isn't so much a special rule as it is just a consequence of the main rule which is that you can only move one card at a time.
If you have 4 free cells, you could take an ordered stack of 5 (e.g. blk J, red 10, blk 9, red 8, blk 7), move the first 4 one at a time into your free cells, move the 5th card to your desired position, and then reverse-order fill back in. Apps will speed this up by just saying you can move stacks sized up to freecell+1 cards.
The tricky part is that an empty column actually doubles the moveable stack size. This is because you could move half of your stack to the free column first, and then move the other half to the destination and move the first half back on top. You don't, then get this doubling if you're using your free column as your target destination!
The rules for moveable ordered stack size are (FreeCells + 1) x (FreeColumns¹ + 1)
¹ Empty columns not being used as your destination
This is confusing and hard to understand but made more sense when I realized it's just a shortcut for shuffling around cards one at a time.