How to Play Solitaire (Peg Solitaire): The Rules and How to Finish With One Marble

Picture a small wooden board, a cross of holes filled with marbles, and one empty space in the middle. That is the whole game laid out in front of you. Peg solitaire is a single-player puzzle: you jump marbles over one another, removing them one at a time, until you cannot move again.

First, a quick word to clear up the most common mix-up. This is peg solitaire — the board game played with pegs or marbles — and not Klondike, the card game most people now call "Solitaire" on a computer. The card version came much later. The board has been keeping people quietly absorbed since at least the seventeenth century.

It looks simple, and the rules are. Finishing it properly — with a single marble left, sitting in the centre — is the part that has kept it on parlour tables for centuries. Here is exactly how it works.

The board and the one rule that starts it all

A peg solitaire board is a flat block of holes arranged in a cross, or plus, shape. The classic English board has 33 holes: a three-by-three square in the middle with an arm of holes reaching out top, bottom, left and right. The European, or French, board has 37 holes, with the corners of those arms filled in. Our wooden boards follow the traditional 33-hole English pattern, played with pegs or marbles.

Setting up takes seconds. Fill every single hole with a marble except the one in the very centre, which you leave empty. On a 33-hole board that means 32 marbles in place and one gap in the middle. That single empty hole is the engine of the whole puzzle — without it, no marble could ever move.

That is genuinely the entire setup. There is no shuffling, no dealing, no opponent to wait for. You sit down, place the marbles, leave the centre open, and you are ready. If you want to see the family it belongs to, it lives happily alongside the rest of our traditional games, our wider board games range and our chess sets.

The move: how a jump works

Peg solitaire has exactly one type of move, and once you have it, you have the game. You jump one marble over an adjacent marble into an empty hole directly beyond it, and then you remove the marble you jumped over. It is the same logic as a single capture in draughts.

The rules around that jump are strict, which is what makes it a puzzle rather than a free-for-all. You may only jump horizontally or vertically — never diagonally. You may only jump over exactly one marble, never two in a row. And you may only land in a hole that is already empty. Three holes in a straight line are involved every time: a marble, its neighbour, and a gap beyond.

So at the start, the only legal moves are the four marbles sitting two holes away from the empty centre. Any one of them can leap inward, removing its neighbour and leaving a fresh gap behind. Each jump removes one marble, so the count ticks down by one with every move.

The aim and how you "win"

The goal is to keep jumping until no legal moves remain, and to leave as few marbles on the board as possible. Stop when you are stuck: every marble that is left has no neighbour-and-gap to jump into. Count what survives — that is your score, and lower is better.

The classic full win is to finish with exactly one marble remaining. Manage that and you have solved the puzzle properly. There is a harder, more elegant target on top of it: the "perfect" finish leaves that single last marble sitting in the centre hole — the very hole you started empty. This centre-start, centre-finish challenge is known as the central game, and it is the famous one to aim for.

On a 33-hole board, going from 32 marbles down to one means making 31 jumps in a row without painting yourself into a corner. End with one in the centre and you have played it the way it was designed to be beaten.

Strategy: how to actually finish with one peg

Most people lose the game in the same way: they leave a single marble stranded out at the tip of an arm with no neighbour to jump and no gap to land in. A marooned marble can never be removed, so it sits there and ends your run early. Avoiding that is most of the skill.

The reliable approach is to clear the board in small "packages" — tidying up three marbles at a time in little L-shaped clusters rather than firing off jumps at random. Clear a corner of an arm, fold it back toward the body of the board, and keep your remaining marbles connected. Connected marbles can always feed each other; lone ones cannot.

The second principle is direction: keep bringing the action back toward the centre. The middle of the board is where the last few jumps need to happen if you want that perfect centre finish, so do not drain it early. Work the outer arms inward, package by package, and leave the centre rich until the very end.

Why a quiet solo game is worth owning

There is something rare about a game that needs nobody else and nothing electronic. No second player, no app, no charging. You set out the marbles and the only thing in the room is the puzzle and you — which is exactly why a solitaire board makes such a good screen-free wind-down, and why it sits comfortably among our wooden toys for a child or a focused ten minutes for an adult.

It travels well, too. Our 12-inch Solitaire Marble Game board and a small bag of marbles fits on a side table or a holiday cottage windowsill, and it suits any age from about eight upwards — the rules take a minute, the mastery takes years. The boards are made from FSC-certified timber and finished to last, which is why they tend to be handed down rather than thrown out.

If you prefer something heirloom-sized, the 15-inch mahogany Solitaire board (£82.50) is the larger centrepiece version of the same game.

Frequently Asked Questions About Peg Solitaire

How do you play peg solitaire?

Peg solitaire is a single-player board game played on a cross-shaped board, usually with 33 holes in the English pattern. Fill every hole with a peg or marble except the centre, which starts empty. On your turn, jump one peg horizontally or vertically over an adjacent peg into the empty hole directly beyond it, then remove the peg you jumped over. You may only jump over one peg at a time and only into an empty hole. Keep jumping until no moves remain. The aim is to be left with as few pegs as possible — ideally just one.

What is the aim of solitaire the board game?

The aim of peg solitaire is to clear the board down to a single peg by jumping pegs over one another and removing them. You start with every hole filled except the centre, then make jump-and-capture moves until no legal moves are left. The fewer pegs you leave behind, the better you have played. The classic full win is to finish with exactly one peg remaining. The harder, more celebrated target — called the central game — is to leave that last single peg sitting in the centre hole, the same hole you began with empty.

Where does the first move start in solitaire?

The first move in peg solitaire always involves the empty centre hole, because a peg can only jump into an empty space. At the start of an English 33-hole board, the only empty hole is the middle one. That means the four pegs sitting two holes away from the centre — directly above, below, left and right of it — are the only ones that can move first. Any one of them jumps inward over its neighbour, lands in the centre, and the jumped peg is removed. From there a new empty hole opens up and the puzzle unfolds.

Can you jump diagonally in peg solitaire?

No. In standard peg solitaire you can only jump horizontally or vertically — never diagonally. Each jump moves a peg in a straight line, up, down, left or right, over exactly one adjacent peg and into the empty hole immediately beyond it. Diagonal jumps are not allowed on the traditional English or European boards, and this restriction is a big part of what makes the puzzle challenging. If diagonal moves were permitted, the game would be far easier to solve. Stick to straight lines over a single peg into an empty hole.

How many pegs are on a solitaire board?

On the standard English board, which has 33 holes, the game starts with 32 pegs. Every hole is filled except the centre, so 33 holes minus one empty centre leaves 32 pegs in play. On the European or French board, which has 37 holes, you start with 36 pegs for the same reason. Each jump you make removes exactly one peg from the board, so the count falls by one with every move. To win the classic way on the 33-hole board, you reduce those 32 pegs down to a single one.

How do you win at peg solitaire?

You win peg solitaire by reducing the board to a single peg. Make jump-and-capture moves — each one removes a peg — and keep going until only one is left and no further moves are possible. On a 33-hole board that means 31 successful jumps in a row. The trick is to clear pegs in small connected clusters rather than at random, and never to strand a lone peg out at the tip of an arm where nothing can reach it. The perfect win leaves that final peg in the centre hole.

Is peg solitaire the same as card solitaire?

No, they are completely different games that happen to share a name. Peg solitaire is a physical board game played with pegs or marbles on a cross-shaped wooden board, where you jump and remove pieces. Card solitaire — most commonly Klondike, the version built into computers — is played with a standard deck of 52 cards, arranging them into ordered sequences and suit piles. Both are single-player and both are called solitaire, but the board game is the far older of the two and involves no cards at all.

Is solitaire good for your brain?

Peg solitaire is a good workout for planning and spatial reasoning because every jump changes which moves are possible next, so you have to think several steps ahead. It rewards patience and pattern recognition rather than speed or luck, and there is no element of chance — the outcome depends entirely on the moves you choose. As a calm, screen-free single-player puzzle it also makes a focused, quiet activity for both children and adults. It is the kind of game you can pick up for ten minutes or lose an afternoon to.

How old is the game of solitaire?

Peg solitaire is an old game, with clear references to it dating back to the seventeenth century in Europe, well before the card game of the same name became common. It has been a parlour and fireside game for generations, played quietly by one person at a time. Jaques of London, founded in 1795, has made fine wooden games for over two centuries and produces traditional solitaire boards in the classic English pattern. If you are interested in where games like this come from, our companion post on the history of solitaire goes into more detail.

Peg solitaire is one strand of a much longer story. For where the game sits in the history of British games, read our companion piece on the history of solitaire, and for the wider tale of the firm that has been making these boards since 1795, see the oldest games company in the world.