Genius

Genius is a digital take on the classic peg-solitaire puzzle, ported to the Macintosh in 1995 by Jeremy Vineyard of Viperware. Players jump pegs over their neighbors on a triangular board, removing the jumped peg each turn, with the goal of leaving exactly one peg standing. It is a small, focused brain-teaser in the Mac shareware tradition.

Gameplay

To make a move, the player clicks any peg and drags it to a destination hole on the far side of an adjacent peg. Each successful jump removes the peg that was leapt over. The challenge is to plan a sequence of jumps that leaves a single peg on the board, ideally in the center hole.

Presentation

Genius supports both 256-color and black-and-white play, switching its memory footprint accordingly. The interface is a single window with the triangular board and the pegs, sized for the small screens of mid-1990s compact and desktop Macs.

System requirements

The application is a 68k binary that runs from a Mac Plus through the PowerMac 8100/110, under System 6.x through Mac OS 9. It requests roughly 450K of RAM in color mode and 200K in monochrome.

Emulation

Modern players can launch Genius under Mini vMac or Mini vMac II for the smallest configurations, or under Basilisk II and SheepShaver for color and later-system testing.