What is Five pegs, eight colours?
Five pegs, eight colours is the larger edition of Code Breaker. The rules are the same as in the standard game: the codemaker sets a code, the codebreaker guesses, and each guess earns a black peg for every right colour in the right place and a white peg for every right colour in the wrong place. Colours may repeat in the code and in the guesses.
What changes is the size of the puzzle. Codes are five pegs long and use eight colours, pink and cyan joining the standard six. That gives 32,768 possible codes, about 25 times as many as the 1,296 of the standard game, so the codebreaker gets twelve guesses instead of ten. With more colours than the standard game, the first guesses have more to rule out, and a guess that uses five different colours tells you a lot about which colours are in the code at all.
Rule changes
| Rule | Standard Code Breaker | Five pegs, eight colours |
|---|---|---|
| Code length | Standard Code Breaker4 pegs. | Five pegs, eight colours5 pegs. |
| Colours | Standard Code Breaker6: red, blue, green, yellow, purple and orange. | Five pegs, eight colours8: the six standard colours plus pink and cyan. |
| Guess limit | Standard Code Breaker10 guesses. | Five pegs, eight colours12 guesses. |
| Possible codes | Standard Code Breaker1,296. | Five pegs, eight colours32,768. |
| Other options | Standard Code BreakerRepeated colours allowed and no blanks. | Five pegs, eight coloursNo duplicates and blanks can be added alongside it, and the code length, colours and guess limit can still be changed in the options. |
History
The board game with coloured pegs was invented by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert, in 1970, and first sold in 1971 and 1972 with four holes and six colours. A larger edition with five holes and eight colours followed in 1972 and has been sold under several names since.
The standard game was the subject of an early computer study: in 1976 Donald Knuth showed that the codebreaker can always find the four-peg, six-colour code in five guesses or fewer. The larger edition is far harder to search by hand, which is why it gets more guesses here.