Daily Peg Solitaire

Daily Peg Solitaire gives the specialist one date-stable jump-elimination puzzle each day without changing the platform’s frozen Today’s 6. The same local date selects the same difficulty, verified source, symmetry and final target. Reopening the date restores the same autosaved board when browser-local storage is available.

A deterministic specialist Daily

The Daily board is not downloaded from a remote puzzle API. The date is fed into the same local deterministic selector used by seeded Practice. It chooses from the 60 verified source positions and applies one legal topology symmetry. Because the source route is transformed with the board, the verifier can replay the exact dated board rather than trusting a generic solvability flag.

The six-day difficulty rhythm is Standard, Easy, Standard, Easy, Standard, Challenge. Across 2026 that produces 183 Standard dates, 122 Easy dates and 60 Challenge dates. The ratio favors the middle English-board mode while still revisiting Triangle and European layouts regularly.

What a Daily completion proves

A completion means the board reached exactly one remaining peg on the specified target using legal jumps. Since each jump removes one peg, the number of jumps is determined by the starting peg count. The site therefore avoids presenting a fake minimum-jump score. Daily history records the actual board family, jumps, active elapsed time, target and whether a Hint was used.

The verified claim is reachability of the required target. The site does not claim that the stored route is the only solution, and it does not turn a Daily result into an intelligence score, percentile, attention measure, diagnosis or cognitive-health assessment.

Daily history and streak are separate from Today’s 6

When a dated board is completed, the Peg Solitaire specialist stores one history row for that date. Its own streak advances from the prior date’s Peg Solitaire history. That streak is not the platform’s main Daily streak and does not fill a slot in Today’s 6.

This containment is deliberate. Today’s 6 uses a frozen source sequence so earlier Daily behavior does not change every time a new specialist is added. Peg Solitaire can still support a compelling daily habit loop through its own route and local history without modifying that stable rotation.

Autosave preserves the exact board

Each successful jump writes the current peg positions, jump count, Undo stack, Assisted status and active elapsed time to local storage. If the browser context is closed and the same date is reopened, the application can reconstruct the exact in-progress position rather than returning to the source start.

Pause stops active timing and hides the board behind a pause layer. Hiding the browser page also pauses active timing before autosaving. This keeps a Daily record from being dominated by time spent on another tab.

Undo and Hint on a dated board

Undo is part of normal exploration and does not mark the solve Assisted. Restart returns to the deterministic source for that date. Hint does mark Assisted because it reveals a verified continuation. If the current state matches a point on the stored source route, the next source jump can be shown immediately. Otherwise the local DFS searches the current board and only reports a move when it verifies a path to the target.

When no continuation is proven within the defined search limit, the game says that the position was not verified rather than asserting that an arbitrary jump is safe. The user can then Undo or Restart.

Three Daily geometries

Easy Daily dates use Triangle 15, where six lattice directions create diagonally connected jump chains. Standard dates use the English 33-hole cross. Challenge dates use European 37, whose wider shoulder cells change edge access. The same rules therefore produce visibly different planning problems over the calendar.

The dedicated 32-peg Classic English preset is not injected into the Daily cycle. Classic remains a stable benchmark start, while Daily draws from the verified source bank so each date can have a different position.

Mobile and keyboard accessibility

The board scales to a narrow phone viewport without horizontal page overflow. A tap selects a peg and then a highlighted landing hole. Keyboard users can move focus around the board with arrow keys and activate cells with Enter or Space. These controls operate the real DOM board and are exercised in Chromium QA rather than simulated by calling the state transition function directly.

The target is visually marked even when a peg occupies it, so the final requirement is not conveyed by color alone. The selected peg and legal landing holes also receive separate visual treatment.

Year-wide reproducibility

Before release, QA enumerates every date in the target year. It checks structural validity, deterministic selection, transformed reference replay and the difficulty distribution. Repeated transformed starts are reported honestly rather than silently relabeled as 365 unique puzzles when the verified source-and-symmetry domain is smaller.

This is a local-first Daily contract. There is no server account, global leaderboard or paid puzzle feed in the public build. The benefit is reproducibility and zero puzzle-service cost; the tradeoff is that clearing browser storage can remove local Daily history.