Play Peg Solitaire — Free

What is Peg Solitaire?

Peg Solitaire is a single-player board puzzle played on a cross-shaped grid dotted with pegs. Every hole starts filled with a peg except one — the centre — and your task is to remove pegs, one jump at a time, until as few as possible remain. A move is beautifully simple: a peg leaps horizontally or vertically over a peg sitting right next to it and lands in the empty hole just beyond, and the peg it jumped is lifted off the board. There is no dice, no timer pressure and no opponent; there is only you, a board full of pegs, and the quiet challenge of finding the right chain of jumps.

The version on vygam uses the traditional English board — a 7×7 square with the four corners trimmed away to form a plus sign of 33 holes. The puzzle has been enjoyed for centuries across Europe, and in India it is so well loved that it has its own household name, Brainvita. Because a jump always removes exactly one peg, the board thins out as you play, and a perfect game ends with a single peg standing alone in the middle. It looks easy for the first few moves and then quietly turns into a genuine test of foresight — the moment you stop planning ahead, you find yourself surrounded by lonely pegs that can no longer reach one another.

How to Play

Only straight, single jumps are allowed, and the rules are strict about what counts as a legal move. A jump is illegal — and will not be offered — when:

• you try to jump diagonally — pegs move only up, down, left or right, never on a slant;
• there is no peg to jump over, or the middle square is already empty;
• the landing hole is not empty, or lies outside the cross-shaped board;
• you try to jump more than one peg at once — every move clears exactly one peg.

The round ends when no legal jump remains. If a single peg is left you have solved the puzzle; if two or more pegs are stranded with no way to reach each other, it is a dead end — use Undo to rewind, or start a new game and try a cleaner route.

Peg Solitaire Tips & Strategy

Peg Solitaire rewards patience and planning far more than speed. A run that looks fine early can collapse into scattered, unreachable pegs if you clear the wrong region first. These four ideas will keep your board connected and your final peg count low.

1. Work toward the centre

   The empty hole is your only workspace, so think of the game as steering that gap around the board rather than moving pegs at random. Aim to keep the action flowing toward the middle instead of sprinting to the edges — pegs cleared out at the rim are gone for good and can leave whole arms of the cross cut off. Finishing with the last peg in the central hole is the puzzle's signature victory, and pulling your jumps inward from the start makes that elegant ending far more likely.

2. Avoid isolating pegs

   A peg is only useful while it has a neighbour to jump or be jumped over. The classic mistake is happily clearing one region until a peg is left marooned in a corner with two empty holes around it — dead weight that can never move again. Before you commit to a jump, glance at the pegs it leaves behind and ask whether any of them is about to be stranded. Keeping your pegs in loose, connected clusters preserves options; scattering them into singletons is how a promising board grinds to a halt.

3. Clear pegs in tidy packages

   Experienced solvers think in small repeatable patterns rather than one jump at a time. A block of three pegs in an L or a short line can often be swept away with a neat two- or three-jump sequence that returns the empty hole close to where it started, ready to attack the next group. Learning to recognise these little "packages" — and the order that dissolves them cleanly — turns a chaotic board into a series of manageable clean-ups and is the real secret behind consistent single-peg finishes.

4. Plan the endgame early, and undo freely

   The hardest part of Peg Solitaire is the last handful of pegs, so it pays to picture where you want to end up long before you get there. Try to keep enough pegs clustered near the centre that your final jumps can converge on the middle hole. When a line of play strands you, do not just restart — tap Undo to step back a move or two and probe a different branch. Treating undo as a thinking tool rather than a rescue button is how you learn which early jumps quietly doomed the board.

The English Board & Where Peg Solitaire Comes From

The board you are playing is the English (or standard) layout: a 7×7 square with the four 2×2 corners removed, leaving a symmetrical cross of 33 holes. It is the shape most people picture when they think of the game, and its balanced arms are what make the centre-peg finish possible. Other traditions use different boards — the European version adds a few extra holes to round out the corners, and triangular pegboards popular in diners swap the grid for a 15-hole triangle — but the jump-and-remove rule is identical across all of them.

Nobody knows exactly when Peg Solitaire was invented, but references to a nobleman playing it appear in Europe as far back as the seventeenth century, and it has never really gone out of fashion since. Part of its staying power is how little it needs: a small board, a scatter of pegs, and a few quiet minutes. That same minimalism is why it travels so well as a digital puzzle — no reflexes, no accounts, no timers, just a clean logic problem you can pick up for two minutes or chew on until you nail the perfect one-peg solve. Your fewest-pegs-remaining result is saved on this device, so every session gives you a personal best to beat.

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