How to play peg solitaire
- Choose the English cross board (32 pegs, the center hole empty) or the triangle (14 pegs, the top hole empty). Choose start hole lets you leave a different hole empty.
- Click a peg, then click the empty hole two places away, straight across or down, to jump over the peg between them. The jumped peg comes off the board. You can also drag a peg into the hole.
- Keep jumping until no jumps are left. One peg left is a perfect game; on the English board, ending in the center hole is the classic finish.
Tips for peg solitaire
- Don’t strand pegs at the edges. Pegs alone in a corner or arm of the board are hard to remove later. Clear the arms of the cross early, while there are still pegs nearby to jump with.
- Think in packages. Experienced players learn short sequences that clear a block of three pegs (for example, a row of three next to a full row) and leave the rest of the board as it was.
- Keep the center busy. Most jumps pass through the middle, so emptying it early leaves fewer moves later.
- Use Undo to explore. When you get stuck with several pegs left, step back and try a different jump at the point where things went wrong.
About the game
Peg solitaire is a one-player board game played since at least the late 17th century in France, where an engraving from the 1690s shows a French princess at the board. The English board has 33 holes in the shape of a cross; the triangle with 15 holes is a popular smaller version. Despite simple rules, finishing with a single peg takes planning, and mathematicians from Leibniz onward have studied it to work out which starting and finishing holes are possible.