Wood Peg Solitaire - Fun and Decorative

Do you like puzzles and brain teasers? Then you will certainly enjoy playing peg solitaire, one of the most popular, fun and addictive board games of all times. The game consists of a board with 37 holes in the shape of a cross and 36 pegs or marbles. The aim of the game is to jump one peg over another and end with just one peg in the centre hole. While the rules and the objective of the game seem simple enough, this is quite deceptive and it can be really frustrating to discover that the puzzle turns out to be much more difficult than expected!

Here however, I will introduce you to a wooden peg solitaire game that is not only fully functional, but extremely decorative as well. It has a beautiful real wood base and the marbles are made out of hand-cut and polished semi-precious stones. It can be a beautiful center piece in any living room or study and it will certainly attract the curiosity and admiration of your guests.

I have had one of these lovely pieces for years and I keep it on my glass coffee table in the living room, between the large sofa and the fireplace, so it is both ornamental and easy to reach if someone wants to play with it. I can tell you that every single person who visits me is attracted to it, and eventually most of them want to pick it up and try their luck at solving this brilliant puzzle.

Photo credit: Amazon

This beautiful wooden solitaire is very much like the one I own. It includes 38 20 mm marbles hand-cut and polished from semi-precious stones from Madagascar

We had very strong gales yesterday where I live and they eventually resulted in a power outage early in the evening. The power was restored a little before dawn, which meant that we had to spend the evening and most of the night in the cold and dark. My husband was away on a business trip and I had to cope with two very bad tempered children who suddenly lost their secure electronic world of TV, computer games and the Internet. When they finally went grumpily to bed, I had to face a dark and cold evening all alone, unable to watch TV, read, knit, work at my computer,cook, talk with my husband or do anything I usually do in the evenings.

I dejectedly sat in front of the fire to keep warm and that is when I spotted my wooden solitaire game sitting on the coffee table. Although I love this game, I rarely have the time to play with it under normal circumstances, when I have so many other things demanding my attention. Last night however, having nothing better to do, I picked it up and was very soon immersed in trying to solve the puzzle. The concentration necessary to win, the peaceful repetitive movements of handling the smooth, multicolored semi-precious stones and jumping them over one another, soon made me forget all about power outages, grumpy children, absent husbands and wild winds howling outside, and without realizing it I had spent half the night trying to win at this totally addictive board game.

This is how you start the game.

All the marbles in their holes with the centre hole left empty. You then select a piece and jump over the adjacent piece into an empty hole. Obviously, for your first move, you jump into the empty centre hole.

The piece you have jumped over, is removed from the board.

You repeat this move until there are no more pieces left to jump over.

You have won when your final move leaves you with only one piece in the centre hole.

You are not allowed to jump pieces diagonally, always vertically or horizontally.

In order to successfully end the game, your move before the final move should look something like this.

You then take the piece next to the one in the centre hole, jump over the centre piece, and for your final move, jump over the remaining piece, ending with one single marble in the centre hole,

just like this! Your finished game should look exactly like this and not something like

this, which is how my games very often look like!

All photos, execpt those attributed to Amazon, are credited to summertime18

If you get too frustrated trying to work out how to solve the solitaire puzzle on your own, watch this video. It will show you exactly what to do.

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