Triangular Peg/Marble Solitaire Instructions

Board Snapshot Jump one peg over another into an empty spot, removing the jumped peg from the board. You can jump along any of the three directions parallel to the outside edges of the board. Just click on a peg and if there's a jump available, the peg will jump. If there's more than one jump available, you'll need to click on a destination. The goal is to finish with one peg.

When the same peg jumps over one or more pegs, it is counted as one move. A move that captures a lot of pegs is called a sweep. After you have solved a puzzle down to one peg, you can try to find a solution with the smallest number of moves, or view the computer's solution to the problem.


What do all the controls do?

Help Resets the game to the starting position with one peg missing.
Set Start Fills the entire board with pegs. Click on one of them to set the starting vacancy (peg missing at the start). Then begin play as usual, or hit Solve.
Back Take back the last jump (all the way back the start if you like). Very useful if you reach a dead end. You can also back up after pausing a demo or after the demo is finished.
Solve Solve the puzzle down to one peg (play a demo). You do not have to Restart the game before hitting Solve, it will reset automatically.. When you play a demo, this button changes to Pause, and if you click it the demo will pause, and the button changes to Continue. You can use these controls to halt the solution at any intermediate point. You can even start playing from an intermediate point — however if you play a move manually you cannot continue the demo.
Current Board Use this to change the size of the board to a triangle with 4 to 24 pegs on a side (10 to 300 holes). If the larger boards do not fit on your screen, set the Board Scale to Small.
Board Scale For playing the game yourself this is best set to Normal. However to display the larger demos you may want to set it to Small, which shrinks the board by 50% in both directions.
Demo Speed This sets the time delay between jumps when playing a demo. You can even change this control while a demo is playing, to speed it up or slow it down. Slow, Normal, Fast, Faster and Fastest correspond to delays of 2, 1, 1/2, 1/10 and 0 seconds between jumps. Note that the Fastest delay of zero may not update correctly in all browsers.
   

Is it always possible to win (reduce the board to one peg)?

Board Snapshot If the number of holes in a triangular board is divisible by 3 (and at least 15), then it is always possible to reduce the board to one peg, no matter where the initial hole is. If however, the number of holes in a triangular board is not divisible by 3 it is not always possible to reduce the board to one peg. Some locations can be solved, others can only be reduced to 2 pegs. Such boards are marked by an asterisk (*) in the Current Board selection. To learn more about why certain locations are not solvable see my page on Triangular Peg Solitaire.

What about those demos?

The figure on the above right is a screen shot from the demo on the board of size 12 (Scale set to Small).

For board sides of 7 or less, the demos show pre-computed solutions. For boards larger than this the solution is calculated, except for a few special cases with long finishing sweeps, such as in the above right figure.

What's that weird text that appears during a solution?

The program reports the move sequence in a format that looks like this:

Triangle(6): 6 moves; e5-c5,b5-d5,c3-e5,f6-d4,a1-c3-e5,d6-f6-d4

To discipher the move notation look here.

It doesn't work on my browser!

The tool is written entirely in Javascript and you must obviously enable this to see anything. This tool has been tested on a wide variety of browsers. The table below lists these browsers and problems (if any). Please let me know if you notice any problems with other browsers.

Browser Platform Problem Problem Description
Internet Explorer 6.0WindowsNone 
Firefox 1.0WindowsNone 
Opera 7.22WindowsNone 
Mozilla 1.7WindowsNone 
Netscape 7.1WindowsNone 
Netscape 6.1Windows None Corrected all previous problems.
K-Meleon 0.9WindowsNone 
Internet Explorer 5.2MacNone 
Camino 0.8.1MacNone 
Safari 1.0Mac Minor Window doesn't update when demo speed is set to Fastest. Use Faster instead.
Safari 1.2.4MacNone?May suffer from same malady as 1.0.

George Bell, January 2005