Play Peg Solitaire on the English (33 holes) or French (37 holes) board with unlimited undo and a hint that comes from a real search. Jump pegs and finish with as few left as you can.
Pegs left 32
Moves 0
Best (fewest left) -
One-peg finishes 0
Click or tap a peg, then click a marked hole to jump over the peg between them and remove it. Click elsewhere or press Escape to let go. Arrow keys move around the board, Enter or Space selects a peg or jumps, U undoes, H gives a hint. Undo is unlimited. A best result only counts if you did not use the hint.
A jump moves a peg in a straight line, up, down, left or right, over one neighbouring peg into the empty hole straight beyond it. The peg it jumped over is removed. Every jump removes exactly one peg, so a game with N pegs left always took exactly the starting pegs minus N moves. A one-peg finish on the English board takes 31 moves. On the French board a one-peg finish is impossible from the centre start (a parity argument on its jump lines shows it), so two pegs is the best possible there, in 34 moves. The game ends when no jump is left. On the English board one peg in the centre rates Perfect, one elsewhere Excellent, two Very good, three Good, and four or more Keep trying. On the French board two pegs rate Perfect, then three Excellent, four Very good, five Good, and six or more Keep trying.
The hint is a depth-first search over positions stored as bitmasks. Positions it has fully explored and found hopeless go into a set so they are never searched twice, and the search stops after 80,000 positions so the page never freezes. If it stops early it says so instead of guessing. It looks for any line that reaches the best possible finish (one peg on the English board, two on the French board), not only one that ends in the centre.
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Every hole holds a peg except the centre one. A move jumps a peg in a straight line, up, down, left or right, over one neighbouring peg into the empty hole directly beyond it. The peg you jumped over is removed. There are no diagonal jumps. On the English board the aim is to finish with a single peg, best of all in the centre hole. On the French board a single peg is impossible (see below), so the aim is to finish with two.
Click or tap a peg to select it. Holes it can land in get a dashed green ring and a dot, and the selected peg turns amber with a thick outline. The board is a warm, wood-like plate with darker holes pressed into it, and the pegs are round with a sky-to-violet gradient. Colour is never the only cue: pegs are filled circles, landings have the dashed ring and dot, hints have a solid ring and a diamond, and the empty centre hole shows a small ring. When no jump is left, the pegs left on the board glow slowly, which is skipped if your system asks for reduced motion. Click one to jump. Click anywhere else, or press Escape, to let go of the peg. With the keyboard, the arrow keys move a cursor around the board, Enter or Space selects a peg or jumps, U undoes and H asks for a hint. Pegs and holes are real buttons with names like “Row 4, column 4, peg, can jump” or “empty, legal landing”, so a screen reader can play too.
The game ends when no jump is left. The rating depends on the pegs remaining. English board:
| Pegs left | Rating |
|---|---|
| 1, in the centre hole | Perfect |
| 1, anywhere else | Excellent |
| 2 | Very good |
| 3 | Good |
| 4 or more | Keep trying |
French board, where two is the best possible:
| Pegs left | Rating |
|---|---|
| 2 | Perfect |
| 3 | Excellent |
| 4 | Very good |
| 5 | Good |
| 6 or more | Keep trying |
Board switches between the English cross (33 holes, 32 pegs to start) and the French board (37 holes, 36 pegs to start). The French board is the English one plus four extra holes, each sitting diagonally outside an inner corner of the cross. Undo takes back one jump at a time with no limit and is not counted as help. Using Hint ends your chance at a best result for that game.
Every jump removes exactly one peg: the jumper survives, the jumped peg goes. So the number of pegs left is always the starting count minus the number of moves made. The test suite checks this after every move of many random games on both boards. It means a finish with one peg always takes 31 moves on the English board, that a two-peg finish on the French board takes 34, and that a game can never run longer than the starting pegs minus one. The Moves counter is just pegs removed.
Give every hole a 0 or a 1 so that, along every jump line of three holes, the three numbers add up to an even total. Then whether the number of pegs standing on holes marked 1 is odd or even can never change during a game, because a jump removes two pegs and adds one on the same line. The test suite works out every such marking from the real jump table. On the English board, the markings allow a single last peg only in the centre or at the tip of one of the four arms. On the French board they allow no hole at all. So from the centre start, nobody can finish on one peg on the French board, and the best possible result is two. The test suite also finds a two-peg finish there. The English board keeps its one-peg goal.
The English board has exactly four first moves, all into the centre hole, from the four arms of the cross. The French board also has exactly four.
The hint is a depth-first search. A position is stored as a bitmask, two integer words for the up to 37 holes, and the search tries each legal jump in a fixed order, going as deep as it can. When a position has been fully explored and no jump from it leads to a single peg, it goes into a set of dead positions so it is never searched twice. A dead position is recorded only after every jump from it has been tried to the end, so a search that is cut short never marks a position dead by mistake.
The search stops after 80,000 positions so the page cannot freeze. It then has three honest answers:
The suite also checks the solver against a plain recursive search with no shortcuts on late-game positions of both boards, and the two agree on every position tested, both when a finish exists and when it does not.
The hint looks for any best possible finish, not specifically one that ends in the centre. The test suite separately confirms that the solver can find a 31-move line from the English start that ends with one peg in the centre hole.
Nothing is uploaded and there is no account. For each board the page stores your best result (fewest pegs left) and how many unaided games you finished with the best possible result (one peg on the English board, two on the French board), as small whole numbers kept under one key in your browser’s local storage, inside a small JSON object. Clearing site data removes them. The only other state is the board you chose, kept in the page address.
A result counts toward your best only if the game was finished without using the hint. Reaching the best possible result counts toward that total once per game.
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For informational purposes only. Not financial, medical, or legal advice. You are solely responsible for how you use these tools.