14 Marble Solitaire Game

GAMEBOARD

History of the Game

There seems to be much in literature about the history of Marble and Peg Solitaires going back to about 1700. One legend claims that Solitaire was invented by a French mathematician Pelisson in order to keep the self-indulged king Louis XIV entertained. According to another legend it was a French nobleman who invented the game while imprisoned in the Bastille; he devised the game using a Fox & Geese Board (the Fox & Geese Board has been used for a variety of board games in Northern Europe since the Vikings). There is doubt about these legends, since Ovid wrote about the game and described it in his book "Ars Amatoria". In fact, people in Europe rediscovered Solitaire around the XIIth century with a game called "Al-qirq" (the mill, in Arabic), which later became the game of "Alquerque" . Mathematicians like Leibniz and Édouard Lucas have written interesting essays about this humble game.

How to play

You are presented a series of 15 marbles arranged in a triangle, five to a side. When you start, a random marble is removed from one of those positions, and you must then use the remaining marbles to jump over each other (as in checkers) removing the jumped marbles from the game.

The object of the game is to have only one marble remaining in the end. It is possible to win from every starting position. To move the marbles, first select a marble to be moved and then click the position into which you wish to jump it.