The rules

Peg solitaire rules

Peg solitaire is a puzzle for one player. You are given a board full of pegs with a single empty hole, and a single kind of move. Everything that makes the game hard comes from the order you choose to make those moves in.

The board

The standard English board is a cross of 33 holes: a row of seven across the middle three rows, with three-hole arms above and below. Label the columns a to g from the left and the rows 1 to 7 from the top, and the centre hole is d4.

At the start, all 33 holes are filled except d4, which leaves 32 pegs on the board.

What counts as a legal move

A move needs three holes in a straight line — horizontal or vertical:

1. a hole with a peg in it (the peg that moves),
2. an adjacent hole with a peg in it (the peg being jumped),
3. an empty hole directly beyond it (where the moving peg lands).

The moving peg hops over its neighbour into the empty hole, and the peg it jumped is taken off the board. Three rules follow from that and never change:

• Diagonal jumps are illegal on the English board.
• You may only jump one peg at a time — no chains of two.
• Every jump removes exactly one peg, so the count only goes down.

How to win

The game ends when no legal jump remains. You have solved it if exactly one peg is left and it is sitting in the centre hole. Because you begin with 32 pegs and each jump removes one, a complete solution is always 31 jumps long.

Finishing with one peg somewhere other than the centre is a near miss and a respectable result — it is a genuinely harder constraint than it looks. Ending with two or more pegs and no legal move means the board is dead.

Notation

Moves are usually written as the starting hole and the landing hole, since the peg jumped over is always the one between them. d2–d4 means "the peg on d2 jumps the peg on d3 and lands on d4." Our 31-move solution is written that way.

Common variants

The rules above describe the English board, which is the one most people mean by "peg solitaire". You will also meet:

• European (French) board — 37 holes, with the corners filled in. It cannot be solved from a centre start.
• Triangular board — 15 holes in a triangle, the version sold in American restaurants as the Cracker Barrel peg game. Diagonal jumps along the triangle's lines are legal there.
• Diamond, 6×6 and larger boards — same jump rule, different geometry and different solvable starting holes.

The board on this site is the classic English 33-hole board. Play it here →