Daily Peg Solitaire
How to play
A peg jumps over a neighbour into the empty hole beyond, and the peg it jumped is removed. Jumps go up, down, left and right, never diagonally.
Click a peg to pick it up and the holes it can reach are marked. Click one to jump.
The goal
Thirty two pegs, one empty hole. Finish with a single peg, sitting in the hole that started empty. The starting hole moves each day.
If you get stuck
Undo steps back as far as you like, so you can explore a line and retreat from it. Your board saves in this browser, so you can come back to it later today.
Every Jump Costs a Peg
Thirty two pegs have to become one, and each jump removes exactly one peg. So every solution takes exactly thirty one jumps, no more and no fewer. There is no shorter route to find and no efficiency to chase.
That is what makes this puzzle unusual. The difficulty is not in finding a quick path, it is in not stranding yourself. Pegs get marooned in the arms of the cross with nothing left to jump, and by the time that becomes obvious the mistake was made many moves earlier.
Any Hole Can Be the Starting Gap
On this board, the thirty three hole English cross, you can start with the gap anywhere and still finish with the last peg back in that same hole. Every one of the thirty three was solved by search before being published here, and each solution was replayed independently to confirm it.
Finishing somewhere else is a different question and a much more restricted one. Where the final peg can land is pinned down by an invariant that survives every jump, which is why asking to end in the hole you began with is the version that always works.
More to Play
There is a daily 15 puzzle, sixteen sudoku variants, a nonogram with hand drawn pictures and 2048. For puzzles you can hold, the puzzle tools page has the solvers and there are plenty in mechanical puzzles.