About

Robinson Roulette is a peg jumping puzzle made by MB (Milton Bradley) in 1985. It consists of a rotatable disc in a frame. Both the frame and the disc are evenly divided into twelve parts, of which eleven have a hole that can accommodate a peg. There are eleven pegs, one white and ten red. At the start the frame is such that the 12 o'clock position has no hole, and all its other holes are empty, and the disc is turned such that its 6 o'clock position has no hole and all its 11 holes filled with pegs. It does not matter which of the disc's holes contains the white peg, as long as it is not the 12 o'clock position. During play you will perform moves (described in a moment) that take a peg from the disc and place it in the frame. The aim is to find a sequence of eleven moves so that all the pegs end up in the frame, and furthermore that the last peg to move is the white one. Regardless of where the white peg started, the puzzle is solvable. A move consists of holding the peg at the 12 o'clock position on the disc, using it to turn the disc until the peg is adjacent to an empty spot on the frame, and then jumping the peg from the disc into that empty spot. In order to follow this up with another move, the new 12 o'clock spot must have a peg. If the 12 o'clock position on the disc is empty but there are still pegs on the disc, then you have failed to solve it and will have to try again. You therefore have to choose your moves carefully so that you get a chain of eleven moves, ending with the white peg. Robinson Roulette was invented by T.A. Pegg in 1985. At the same time he also invented a mechanically similar game called Rota Snooker. He marketed this himself, but licensed Robinson Roulette to MB for the European market. One of the conditions of the licensing was that his name would appear on the packaging, and the box of mine indeed has underneath the barcode the text "Created by Terry Pegg of Choro Ltd, Birmingham, U.K.". If your browser supports it, you can click on the link below to play with a Javascript version of the Robinson Roulette.