Bakers Game begins by dealing out all 52 cards into 8 tableau piles. The first 4 piles will have 7 cards, the last 4 only 6 cards. All the cards are face up, which makes Bakers Game an open game.
The object of Bakers Game is to build 4 foundation piles up in suit from Aces to Kings. In addition to the foundations and tableau, there are 4 cells. Each cell is a storage place for one card. Any available card can be moved to an empty cell, and cards in the cells can be moved either back to the tableau or to the foundations.
The tableau piles are built down by suit. Moving groups of cards is not strictly allowed in Bakers Game. However, most computer implementations of the game allow for moving groups of cards as a shortcut. If you have all 4 cells empty, for example, it would be possible to move a group of 5 cards in sequence down by alternate color by moving the top 4 cards to the cells, then moving the 5th card, then moving the 4 cards back from the cells to reform the group. Since this is a rather laborious process, most Bakers Game games allow you to simply move all 5 cards together at once.
The effect of this is that the number of empty cells determines how many cards you can move as a group. It is very important to try to keep the cells as empty as possible so that you can move more cards around in the tableau. Another effect is that clearing a tableau pile also greatly increases the number of cards you can move as a group, since the empty pile can be used not only to store one card, but an entire group of cards.
Bakers Game is much harder to win than FreeCell. Average players win it about 35% of the time