Peg Solitaire

The board starts full of pegs with one empty hole. A peg can jump over an adjacent peg into an empty hole directly beyond it, and the jumped peg is removed. Keep jumping to thin out the board. The goal is to clear it down to a single remaining peg, ideally in the center.

• Jumps are horizontal or vertical, never diagonal.
• Each jump must land in an empty hole and removes the peg it leaps.
• You win by reducing the board to one peg; you're stuck if no jumps remain.

• Desktop: click a peg, then click the empty hole to jump it there.
• Phone & tablet: tap a peg, then tap the landing hole.

• Daily seeded layout shared by all players.
• Practice as often as you like.

• Work toward the center and avoid stranding lone pegs in the corners.
• Plan chains of jumps backward from the position you want your last peg to end up.

Peg solitaire arrives in the record already fashionable, at the court of Louis XIV, and can be dated with unusual precision: the August 1697 edition of the French literary magazine Mercure galant discusses it.

There is a portrait to go with the date. About ten years later Claude Auguste Berey engraved Anne de Rohan-Chabot, Princess of Soubise, with the puzzle sitting beside her — which tells you something about the company it kept before it became a children's toy.

The naming is a transatlantic accident worth knowing. In Britain this game is simply "solitaire"; in the United States that word was taken by the card games, so the pegs had to be specified. Same object, two names, depending on which side of the ocean claimed the word first.

Peg Solitaire is the traditional one-player board puzzle of jumping and removing pegs, free to play in your browser. Built in-house at PlayPendium.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.