Peg solitaire

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Every hole but one starts with a peg in it. A peg jumps over a peg beside it, along a line of the board, and lands in the empty hole two along. The peg it jumped over comes off the board, so every jump leaves one peg fewer. The aim is to finish with one.

Tap a peg to pick it up. Every hole it can jump into is ringed. Tap one of those to jump, or drag the peg onto it. Tap the peg again to put it back. A hole that cannot be jumped into is refused: nothing moves, the hole is ringed in red for a moment, and the line under the board says why.

A hole with nothing in it is dark and empty. A hole you may jump into wears a ring and a dot. The peg you are holding sits up off the board with a ring round it. A brass line joins the last jump you made.

The English cross is 33 holes and has a groove cut round its middle hole. The triangle is 15 holes and marks none. On the cross, finishing on the middle hole is the classic finish and the result says whether you got there. On the triangle, one peg anywhere is the finish.

Easy and Standard deal a short position. Each one is built by standing one peg on the board and playing jumps backwards, so a finish is there to be found. Challenge is the whole board with one hole empty.

It is easy to leave a peg with nothing beside it. When no jump is left the round is over and the pegs still standing are the result: press End practice to keep it. Undo takes back one jump at a time if you would rather try another way, and Start again puts the board back where it began.

Hint plays the jumps out to the end until it finds one that still leaves one peg, so a hinted jump never strands the board. On the cross it looks for a finish on the middle hole first and says plainly when only a finish somewhere else is left. It counts as one hint. If no jump can leave one peg, it says that instead, and that counts as one hint too. On the full cross it sometimes runs out of room to work the answer out at all. It says so, and that answer costs you nothing.

The result is the pegs left, whether you finished on the middle hole, the jumps you took back, the hints you used and the time. A board with no jump left is a result whatever the pegs left. A board you walk away from with jumps still on it is not a round, and nothing is saved.

The score says how you did on this board. It is not a speed record, and it says nothing about any other puzzle.

The statistics page compares rounds on the same board at the same level. A round finished with one peg counts as a hundred per cent there and a round that ran out of jumps counts as nothing, so the chart reads as how often you finish. Rounds played with a hint are left out of the shared community numbers.

The board clears in packages of three pegs that come off together. Learn to clear in packages