Peg Hopper: read the landing before making the jump
Use a three-hole teaching pattern to track every changed hole, then compare jumps by the useful sources and landings they leave behind.
Worked examples use the Standard board unless a different size is stated. Hard and Expert may change the board dimensions or amount of information to track.
Inspect all three holes
A legal jump needs an occupied source, an occupied adjacent hole and an empty landing beyond it. All three must lie in a straight horizontal or vertical line on the cross. Checking only the empty destination misses the peg that must be removed in between.
The interface lets you select a source before choosing its landing. If you select another peg instead, you change the source. This makes it possible to compare nearby options without committing a move or treating an accidental selection as a lost turn.
Track a simple central example
Number rows and columns from one. Imagine pegs at row 4, columns 2 and 3, with column 4 empty. The first peg can jump right across the second into column 4. Afterward, columns 2 and 3 are empty and column 4 contains a peg.
That is a teaching arrangement, not a prescribed opening for the current puzzle. It highlights the complete effect: one source is vacated, one crossed peg disappears and one landing becomes occupied. Draw all three changes before deciding what the resulting position makes possible.
Ask what the landing can do next
An empty hole can support several possible jumps. Filling it may help one peg move while preventing another from using that destination. Compare the remaining occupied neighbours and empty landings after a candidate jump, especially near the narrow arms of the cross.
A lone peg cannot move without a neighbouring peg to cross, but distance alone does not prove that it is permanently trapped. Other jumps may create a useful neighbour later. Prefer a concrete explanation of the next available jump over a vague instruction to remove outer pegs first.
Use a reversible experiment
Try one candidate, inspect the changed holes, then use Undo before comparing another. Undo restores both removed source positions and the former empty landing exactly. Restart returns to the original arrangement when a long branch has become difficult to describe.
A short record can name a jump by source and destination, such as 4,2 to 4,4. Keep the coordinate convention fixed. Describing only the removed middle peg is ambiguous because it does not identify which side supplied the jumper.
Understand the promise behind the starting board
The starting constructions were made backward from one central peg, replacing a landing peg with an empty source and middle that become occupied. Reversing that construction provides a checked forward solution. The displayed boards use finite rotations and reflections, rather than an unlimited supply of unrelated handcrafted positions.
The goal accepts a single peg anywhere; it does not demand a central finish. Every jump removes exactly one peg, so an eight-peg Standard board needs seven jumps, a fourteen-peg Hard board thirteen, and a twenty-peg Expert board nineteen. Those counts describe completion, not which route to choose.
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