What is peg solitaire?
Peg solitaire — also called Solo Noble, or just solitaire before card solitaire took the name — is a single-player board puzzle dating back to seventeenth-century France. The board is a pattern of holes holding pegs, with one hole left empty at the start. Only one kind of move exists: a peg jumps over a peg directly beside it and lands in the empty hole immediately beyond, and the peg it jumped over is taken off the board.
Because every jump removes exactly one peg, a board that starts with 32 pegs takes exactly 31 jumps to finish. The difficulty is not in finding a legal move — early on there are plenty — but in avoiding the positions where the pegs are scattered so widely that nothing can reach anything else. Stranding a peg in a far corner is the classic way to lose.
- A peg jumps over one neighbour into the empty hole beyond it.
- The peg you jumped over is removed from the board.
- Jumps go along the board's lines — no diagonal jumps on the square boards.
- Every jump removes exactly one peg, so the number of jumps is fixed.
- The puzzle ends when one peg is left, or when nothing can jump.
The three boards
The English board is the classic 33-hole cross, and it is the one most wooden sets use. It starts with the centre hole empty, and the traditional challenge is not merely to finish with one peg but to finish with that peg sitting back in the centre. It can be done in 31 jumps.
The European board adds four holes to the corners of the cross, making 37. It is a genuinely harder puzzle, and the version starting from the centre hole is impossible — a result you can prove with a colouring argument rather than by exhausting every line. Ours starts from a hole that has been verified as solvable. The triangle board of 15 holes is the little wooden one from American restaurant tables; it allows jumps along all three of its directions and makes an excellent warm-up.
- Triangle (15): five rows, jumps along all three directions, apex hole empty.
- English (33): the classic cross, centre empty, finish in the centre.
- European (37): the cross with filled corners and a harder solve.
- All three end the same way — one peg on the board.
- Undo is unlimited, so a dead end costs you nothing.
How to play here
Tap a peg and the holes it can jump to light up; tap one of those holes and the jump happens, with the peg in between removed. Tapping the selected peg again puts it back down. The counter at the top of the board shows how many pegs are still in play, and the timer starts on your first jump.
Undo steps back through your jumps one at a time and there is no limit, so you can explore a line and reverse out of it. Restart deals a fresh board of the same shape, and the board buttons switch between the three layouts. Your position is saved in your browser, so a half-finished board is waiting when you come back.
- Tap a peg to select it; legal landing holes light up.
- Tap a lit hole to jump and remove the peg in between.
- Undo reverses jumps one at a time, without limit.
- Restart clears the board back to its opening position.
- Progress is stored locally in your browser.
A solving strategy
The single most useful habit is to work inward. Pegs on the outer arms of the cross are the ones that get stranded, because a peg needs a neighbour and a gap beyond it to move at all — and out on the edge there are fewer of both. Clear the arms early while the board is still crowded, and keep the middle dense so it can absorb what is left.
Experienced players think in blocks rather than single jumps. A group of three pegs in a row with a hole at the end can be cleared entirely by a short chain of jumps that leaves the surrounding board untouched; so can a 2x3 block, and a six-peg L. Learning two or three of these packages turns the endgame from guesswork into assembly, because you start seeing the board as a handful of clearable shapes instead of thirty-odd individual pegs.
Finally, watch for chains. A single peg can jump several times in one turn if each landing spot sets up the next jump, and chaining is how the good solutions stay tidy — one peg does a lap of the board and sweeps up a whole arm rather than leaving stragglers behind.
- Clear the outer arms first, while the centre is still crowded.
- Never leave a lone peg where nothing can reach it.
- Learn the three-in-a-row and 2x3 block clears.
- Chain jumps with a single peg when the landings line up.
- If you strand something, undo early rather than playing on.