Peg Solitaire online

Peg Solitaire is a one-player elimination puzzle. A legal move jumps one peg over an adjacent peg into an empty hole and removes the jumped peg. The rule is tiny, but the planning problem is not: every jump changes which lines remain available, and a locally attractive capture can leave several isolated pegs that can no longer reach the final target.

Triangle, English and European boards

V0.118 does not treat every board as the same 33-hole cross. Easy uses a 15-hole triangular lattice with six jump directions. Standard uses the familiar 33-hole English cross. Challenge uses the wider 37-hole European cross. The geometry changes which pegs can support one another, so the difficulty bands are meaningfully different planning problems rather than cosmetic themes.

The specialist also includes a dedicated Classic English preset: all 32 pegs are present on the English board and the center is empty. The required finish is one peg back in the center. A project-local C++ bitboard solver independently found a legal 31-jump center finish, and the stored sequence is replay-checked again in JavaScript.

60 project-generated verified sources

The Practice bank contains 60 source positions: 20 Triangle, 20 English and 20 European. They are generated inside the project rather than downloaded from a remote level service or copied from an unknown puzzle collection. Each source begins with a specified final target and is created by reversing legal jumps from that target, which gives the generator a constructive solution path. The released verifier then replays that path forward before accepting the source.

Practice applies topology-preserving rotations or reflections after selecting a source. Triangle boards use the six symmetries of an equilateral triangle; the square-coordinate English and European boards use eight dihedral symmetries. The transformed pegs, target and every stored jump are all transformed together and replayed, so the site does not merely assume that a visual rotation preserved a valid route.

Why the site does not invent a minimum-jump score

Every legal Peg Solitaire jump removes exactly one peg. That means a successful board starting with N pegs and ending with one must always use exactly N−1 jumps. A 19-peg source needs 18 jumps if it is solved at all. The interesting question is reachability of the required final target, not a fabricated par that pretends one successful route uses fewer captures than another.

The application therefore reports the starting peg count, jumps taken, remaining pegs and verified target finish. It does not claim that the stored route is a uniquely optimal sequence, and it does not convert a puzzle result into IQ, percentile, intelligence, attention or medical conclusions.

Undo, Restart and verified Hint

Undo reverses one actual jump and does not automatically mark a result Assisted. Restart returns to the exact seeded start. Hint does mark the run Assisted because it reveals solution information. When the current position is still on the stored verified route, Hint uses the next verified jump directly. If the player has deviated, the local solver searches the current state and only gives a recommendation when it can prove a continuation to the required target inside its search limit.

If the solver cannot verify a continuation within that limit, the interface says so instead of inventing a move. That distinction matters because Peg Solitaire positions can look promising even when the final isolated pegs cannot be reconnected.

Keyboard, pointer and touch play

Tap or click a peg to select it, then choose one of the highlighted legal destination holes. On a keyboard, Tab enters the board, arrow keys move focus between board cells, and Enter or Space activates the focused cell. Ctrl/Cmd+Z performs Undo, P toggles Pause and H asks for a Hint. The same interaction model works without requiring tiny drag gestures on a phone.

The board is responsive and uses distinct visual layers for the hole, peg, target, current selection and legal landing destinations. Triangle 15 is laid out on its own triangular grid rather than squeezed into a square list. English and European modes retain their recognizable cross geometries.

Seeded Practice and local records

Practice puts a deterministic seed in the URL. The seed chooses the source and symmetry, so copying the same URL reproduces the same starting state without a server. Local storage keeps autosave, Undo history, completed runs, local bests and specialist Daily history. Active timing pauses when the page is paused or hidden so tab switching does not inflate the displayed time.

This public platform is local-first. There is no account or cloud leaderboard here, so clearing browser storage can remove these records. That is an intentional product constraint rather than a hidden analytics claim.

Classic English as a separate benchmark preset

The Classic button is intentionally separate from seeded difficulty Practice. It always presents the historically recognizable 32-peg center-vacancy English board and always requires the center finish. Because the initial board has 32 pegs, every successful solution contains 31 jumps. V0.118 stores a solver-found reference and makes it replayable through the same real board controls used for ordinary puzzles.

Classic is useful as a stable skill benchmark because the start never changes. The seeded source bank serves replay variety; Classic serves repeatable comparison. Neither is allowed to rewrite Today’s 6.

Search surface without doorway spam

The actual variation stays inside the game. V0.118 adds this Peg Solitaire guide and one distinct Daily Peg Solitaire guide. It does not manufacture separate search pages for Triangle seed 1, English seed 2, 18-jump boards, mobile boards, easy boards, hard boards or supposed IQ scores. Search-facing expansion continues to follow distinct intent only.