How to play peg solitaire
- Start with the classic board. 32 pegs fill the cross-shaped board and the centre hole is empty. Prefer a gentle start? Pick one of the 8 warm-up boards from the menu (4 to 20 pegs).
- Jump a peg. Tap a peg, then tap one of the glowing holes. A peg jumps straight over a neighbouring peg — left, right, up or down, never diagonally — into the empty hole right behind it. You can also drag the peg into the hole.
- Remove the jumped peg. The peg you jumped over is taken off the board automatically, so every jump leaves one peg fewer.
- Finish with one peg. Keep jumping until no jump is possible. One peg left means you solved it; one peg in the centre hole is the perfect finish. The classic board needs exactly 31 jumps.
- Undo, restart or ask for a hint. Undo takes back jumps, Restart resets the board and Hint plays the next jump of a winning line found by our solver from your current position.
Peg solitaire strategy: how to get down to one peg
- Don’t strand pegs in the arms. The four arms of the cross are where games are lost. A peg left alone at the end of an arm can only be removed by a peg jumping in from the middle, so clear the arms while there are still pegs next to them.
- Work in “packages”. Experienced players clear the board in small groups: three pegs in a row with a gap beside them, or an L of pegs next to a gap, can be removed in a fixed sequence that leaves the gap where it started. Clearing whole blocks keeps the rest of the board tidy.
- Keep the middle for last. The centre region gives the most jump options. Spend pegs from the edges first and save the crowded middle for the end game.
- Avoid isolated pegs. A peg with no neighbours can’t jump and can’t be jumped. Before each move, check you are not leaving one behind.
- Plan the last few jumps backwards. With five or six pegs left, picture the final jump into the centre and work out which pegs need to be where. The warm-up boards are great practice for this.
Why jumping at random almost never works
We let a computer play 100,000 games of the classic board making a random legal jump each turn. It finished with one peg zero times. On average it got stuck with 7.63 pegs left; only 317 games (0.32%) got down to 3 or fewer, and 697 games jammed after just 6 jumps with 26 pegs still on the board. Getting to one peg takes a plan, not luck.
| Pegs left when stuck | Random games |
|---|---|
| 2–3 | 317 (0.32%) |
| 4–5 | 11,222 (11.2%) |
| 6–7 | 40,777 (40.8%) |
| 8–9 | 35,130 (35.1%) |
| 10–13 | 11,595 (11.6%) |
| 14–26+ | 959 (0.96%) |
Where can the last peg finish?
Colour the board with three colours in diagonal stripes. Every jump changes the number of pegs on each colour by one, so the odd/even pattern of the three counts flips in a fixed way — in both diagonal directions. Starting from the classic position, that pattern only matches a single peg on 5 holes: the centre and the middle hole of each outer edge.
The colouring only proves the other 28 holes are impossible; it doesn’t prove these 5 can be reached. So we asked our solver for each of them — every one has a 31-jump solution.
Warm-up boards
Besides the classic start there are 8 original boards with fewer pegs. Each one was built backwards from a single peg in the centre, so it is guaranteed solvable, and our solver re-checks every one. The success rate is how often random jumping happens to finish it — lower is harder.
More puzzles like peg solitaire
Peg solitaire rewards planning several moves ahead, just like the Tower of Hanoi, where you move a tower of disks in the fewest moves. For sliding puzzles try the 15 puzzle or klotski; for pencil-style logic try Fillomino and LITS. Chinese speakers can play the 孔明棋 version of this page with the same saved games.