How to play
Peg Solitaire, known in Turkey as Tek Taş (“one stone”), is a puzzle you play against the board itself. Every hole but one starts filled with a marble. Your job is to clear them away by jumping, until as few as possible remain. The best result is a single marble.
The jump. Pick a marble that has a neighbour right next to it, with an empty hole directly beyond that neighbour. Your marble hops over the neighbour and lands in the empty hole, and the marble it jumped over is taken off the board. That’s the only move in the game. Each jump removes exactly one marble, so the number of marbles left always tells you how well you’re doing.
On screen. Tap a marble to select it. The holes it can jump to start glowing; tap one to make the jump. If the marble has only one possible jump, tapping it again does it straight away. A counter shows Marbles left and Moves.
The game is over the moment no jump is possible anywhere on the board. The final message rates your finish: one marble is a genius result, two or three is very good, and more than that means there’s room to improve.
Buttons.
- Start over resets the current board to its opening position.
- Undo takes back your jumps one at a time. It still works after the game ends, so you can step back from a dead end and try another route.
- Hint makes a jump for you. It searches ahead for a sequence that still leads to a one-marble finish (on the cross board, one that ends in the centre). If no such sequence exists any more, it plays the jump that leaves the fewest marbles it can find.
The two boards
Choose a board under Board. Switching starts a new game on that board, and your choice is remembered.
Cross (33). The classic English board: a plus-shaped grid of 33 holes, with the centre hole empty at the start, so you begin with 32 marbles. Jumps go across or up and down only, never diagonally. Getting down to one marble takes exactly 31 jumps. Ending with that last marble in the very centre hole is the perfect game, and the board celebrates it with its own message. One marble somewhere else still counts as a win.
Triangle (15). Five rows of holes in a triangle, with the top hole empty at the start, so you begin with 14 marbles. Here marbles jump along all three directions of the triangle’s lines, six ways in total, which gives you many more options per move but much less room. There’s no special centre target; one marble anywhere is a win, reached in 13 jumps.
Both starting positions can be solved down to one marble.
Strategy
Clear the arms first (cross board). The four arms of the cross are narrow, and a marble left alone at the tip of an arm can never be jumped later. Work on the arms while there are still marbles around to help, and leave the wide centre for last.
Never strand a marble. A marble with no neighbours can’t be removed. A pair of marbles with no empty hole beside them in line is just as stuck. Before each jump, look at what it leaves behind.
Learn the three-marble clear. Three marbles in an L shape or a short row next to an empty hole can often be cleared together, leaving the hole pattern almost as it was. Players call these “packages”. Spotting them breaks the cross board into manageable chunks.
Think about the finish early. On the cross, you want the last few jumps to pull marbles inward toward the middle. If your final marbles are scattered near the edges, they won’t meet.
On the triangle, protect the corners. The three corner holes each have only two jump lines. Marbles that end up in corners late in the game are very hard to remove.
Use Hint as a teacher. When you’re stuck, a hint shows a move that keeps a perfect finish possible. Undo it and ask yourself why that jump and not another.
If you like solo puzzles that punish one careless step, Hidato asks you to plan a numbered path through every cell.
If you enjoy Peg Solitaire, try Potion Shelf or Sliding Puzzle next.
