How the Board Is Set Up
Peg solitaire is played on a cross-shaped board of 33 holes. Every hole holds a peg except the very center, which starts empty. Your job is to remove pegs by jumping over them until only one peg remains, ideally sitting in that same center hole. Open peg solitaire and look at the board before you touch anything โ spend the first few seconds just tracing the arms of the cross and locating the four inner corners, since almost every winning plan begins by clearing those corners first.
Unlike checkers, there is no diagonal movement here. A peg travels only in a straight line, horizontally or vertically, and it must jump directly over one adjacent peg into an empty hole immediately beyond it. The peg that was jumped is then removed from the board. If you cannot find a single legal jump anywhere on the board, the game ends immediately, so every move you make should be checked against what it leaves behind, not just what it clears right now.
Making a Legal Move
A move in peg solitaire always has three parts: a peg to move, a peg to jump over, and an empty hole to land in. All three holes must be in a straight line with no gaps. Tap or click the peg you want to move, then tap the empty hole two spaces away in the direction you want to jump. If the game does not let you complete the move, one of the three conditions is missing โ usually there is no peg to jump, or the landing hole is already occupied.
Chain jumps are allowed when the landing hole lets you immediately jump again in a new direction. These multi-jump sequences are the fastest way to clear a cluster of pegs, but they also reshape the board quickly, so pause after each chain and re-scan the arms before committing to your next move.
Reading Board Notation
Serious solvers describe the board with simple coordinates: rows are numbered 1 through 7 from top to bottom, and columns are numbered 1 through 7 from left to right, with the corners of the 7x7 square left off the board entirely. The center hole is (4,4). A move is written as the starting hole followed by the landing hole, for example (4,2)-(4,4), which tells you a peg jumped down two rows in the same column.
You do not need notation to enjoy peg solitaire, but writing down a few moves as you play helps you recognize the packages described below when they appear on your own board, and it lets you replay a promising sequence if an early jump turns out to be a mistake.
The Pagoda Function: Spotting Dead Positions
A pagoda function is a simple weighting trick that tells you, before you make a move, whether a particular target position is even reachable. You assign a number to each hole based on its coordinates, sum the weights of every hole that currently holds a peg, and compare that sum to the weight of the position you are aiming for. If your current total can never shrink down to the target's weight through legal jumps, that target is mathematically dead โ no sequence of moves will ever reach it, no matter how cleverly you play.
You do not need to calculate this by hand every time. The practical version is a habit: whenever you find yourself stuck with pegs scattered in a pattern that never seems to connect, stop and ask whether you have been leaving single pegs stranded two or more holes away from anything else. That is the pagoda function showing up as a felt sense โ pegs that cannot rejoin the group are pegs that were probably orphaned three or four moves earlier in peg solitaire.
The 3-Remove Package
The 3-remove is the smallest reusable pattern in the game. Three pegs sit in an L or straight line with one gap; a single jump clears two of the three pegs and leaves one peg sitting where the gap used to be. It is the basic unit every larger clearing sequence is built from, so train your eye to recognize it instantly rather than searching the whole board move by move.
Use the 3-remove early, while the board is still full, because it is much easier to spot three pegs in a row on a crowded board than on a sparse one. Clearing several 3-removes in the opening moves of peg solitaire also opens travel lanes for the bigger packages described next.
The 6-Remove Package
The 6-remove clears an entire arm of the cross using a short, memorized sequence of three jumps that always leaves one peg behind at a predictable spot. It works because the arm has exactly the right length and spacing for a peg to walk itself down the row, picking off pairs as it goes.
- Start with a peg at the outer tip of one arm and jump inward over the first neighboring peg.
- From the new position, jump again over the next peg in line if a legal landing hole is open.
- Repeat until the arm is reduced to a single traveling peg near the body of the cross.
Once you can execute a 6-remove without hesitation, entire arms of the board stop being a puzzle and become a known, repeatable step, which frees your attention for the harder decisions near the center.
The L-Move and Corner Clearing
The L-move handles the four inner corners of the cross, which are awkward because they only connect to the rest of the board along two directions instead of four. An L-move uses two consecutive jumps at a right angle to walk a corner peg out of its pocket and into the open board, rather than leaving it isolated with no legal jump available.
Clear the corners early in peg solitaire, before the surrounding pegs thin out. Once neighboring holes start emptying, a trapped corner peg can become permanently stuck, which is one of the most common ways a promising game ends several pegs short of a win.
Avoiding Isolated Pegs
The single biggest reason a solve attempt fails is a peg left alone with no neighbor within jumping range in any direction. Once that happens, the peg is dead weight for the rest of the game โ it cannot be removed and it cannot help remove anything else, and it will sit there blocking your route to a single final peg.
- Before jumping, check whether the peg you are about to leave behind still has a neighbor two holes away in at least one direction.
- Favor moves that keep pegs clustered in twos and threes rather than spreading them thin across the board.
- When two isolated pegs are unavoidable, try to steer them toward each other instead of letting them drift apart.
This single habit prevents more failed games than any package or notation trick, because it stops the damage before it happens rather than trying to fix it later in peg solitaire.
A Complete Path to One Peg in the Center
A full solve generally follows the same rhythm: clear the four corners with L-moves first, then work through the arms with 6-removes, using 3-removes to tidy up whatever pairs are left over. Save the center region for last, since it is where every remaining peg has to converge, and premature moves there tend to scatter pegs you will need later.
- Clear both inner-top and inner-bottom corners using L-moves, feeding the freed pegs toward the middle rows.
- Reduce the left and right arms with 6-removes, leaving one traveling peg from each arm near the center column.
- Clean up stray pairs with 3-removes, watching constantly for pegs that are about to become isolated.
- Bring the last two or three pegs together in the middle rows and finish with a jump that lands the final peg on the center hole.
No two games play out identically, since the order you clear things in shifts the exact jumps available later, but this corners-then-arms-then-center order is the most reliable structure to plan around.
Practice Plan and Next Steps
Play a few rounds of peg solitaire focused only on the corners and the 6-remove package until both are automatic. Then play a full game start to finish, writing down your moves in notation whenever you find a sequence that reaches the center. Reviewing that written sequence afterward is the fastest way to understand which decisions mattered and which were just lucky.
If you want a different kind of pattern-recognition challenge afterward, 2048 trains a similar habit of planning several moves ahead before committing. For more structured strategy reading, the puzzle games beginner's guide covers habits that carry over across board puzzles, and you can always return to peg solitaire to put them into practice.