Solitaire

How to play solitaire

The rules

• Solitaire is a puzzle for one. The name means «one who lives alone». This is the English board, a cross of 33 holes; in France a board of 37 holes is more common.
• At the start a peg stands in every hole except the one in the centre.
• A peg moves by jumping over a neighbouring peg into the empty hole just beyond it: up, down, left or right, never diagonally. The peg it jumped over comes off the board.
• A peg may jump again straight away from where it lands. Each jump counts as one.
• The goal is to finish with a single peg, standing in the centre hole. A last peg anywhere else is a near miss, and if no jump is left while more than one peg remains, you are stuck.

In this version

• The holes are numbered down each column, starting from the left, so the centre is hole 17. Tap a peg, then the hole it should jump to.
• «Hint» lights up a jump that still leads to one peg in the centre, if there is one from where you are; otherwise it tells you so.
• «Solution» plays one way through from the start, worked out by the app. There are many others.