Checkers
Checkers, also known as draughts, is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque. The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".
The most popular forms of checkers in Anglophone countries are American checkers, which is played on an 8×8 checkerboard; Russian draughts, Turkish draughts and Armenian draughts, all of them on an 8×8 board; and international draughts, played on a 10×10 board – with the latter widely played in many countries worldwide. There are many other variants played on 8×8 boards. Canadian checkers and Malaysian/Singaporean checkers are played on a 12×12 board.
American checkers was weakly solved in 2007 by a team of Canadian computer scientists led by Jonathan Schaeffer. From the standard starting position, perfect play by each side will result in a draw.
General rules
Checkers is played by two opponents on opposite sides of the gameboard. One player has dark pieces ; the other has light pieces. The player with the darker color moves first, then players alternate turns. A player cannot move the opponent's pieces. A move consists of moving a piece to an adjacent unoccupied square. All pieces move forward only at the beginning of the game. At the beginning of a player's turn, if the adjacent square of a player's piece contains an opponent's piece, and the square immediately beyond it is vacant, the piece may be captured by jumping over it. The captured piece is then removed from the board.Only the dark squares of the checkerboard are used. A piece can only move into an unoccupied square. When capturing an opponent's piece is possible, capturing is mandatory in most official rules. If the player does not capture, the other player can remove the opponent's piece as a penalty, and where there are two or more such positions the player forfeits pieces that cannot be moved. In almost all variants, a player with no valid move remaining loses. This occurs if the player has no pieces left, or if all the player's pieces are obstructed from moving by opponent pieces.
Nowadays, checkers can be played online. It is common to play on various free apps found on the App Store and the Google Play Store.
Pieces
Man
An uncrowned piece moves one step ahead and captures an adjacent opponent's piece by jumping over it and landing on the next square. Multiple enemy pieces can be captured in a single turn provided this is done by successive jumps made by a single piece; the jumps do not need to be on the same diagonal direction and may "zigzag". In American checkers and Spanish draughts, men can jump only forwards; in international draughts and Russian draughts, men can jump both forwards and backwards.King
When a man reaches the farthest row forward, known as the kings row or crown head, it becomes a king. It is marked by placing an additional piece on top of, or crowning, the first man. The king has additional powers, namely the ability to move any amount of squares at a time, move backwards and, in variants where men cannot already do so, capture backwards. Like a man, a king can make successive jumps in a single turn, provided that each jump captures an enemy piece.In international draughts, kings can move any number of squares, forward or backward. Kings with such an ability are also informally called flying kings. They may capture an opposing man, regardless of distance, by jumping to any of the unoccupied squares immediately past the man. Because jumped pieces remain on the board until the turn is completed, it is possible to reach a position in a multi-jump move where the flying king is blocked from capturing further by a piece already jumped.
Flying kings are not used in American checkers; a king's only advantage over a man is the additional ability to move and capture backwards.
Naming
In most non-English languages, checkers is called dame, dames, damas, or a similar term that refers to ladies. The pieces are usually called men, stones, "peón" or a similar term; men promoted to kings are called dames or ladies. In these languages, the queen in chess or in card games is usually called by the same term as the kings in checkers. A case in point includes the Greek terminology, in which checkers is called "ντάμα", which is also one term for the queen in chess.History
Ancient origins
The ancestry of checkers / draughts remains shrouded in uncertainty. Popular accounts frequently trace the game back thousands of years to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, though such claims warrant careful examination. Archaeological discoveries in Ur, an ancient Mesopotamian city in present-day Iraq, have yielded game boards dating to approximately 3000 BCE. However, characterizing these as early checkers boards stretches credibility. The Game of Ur employed seven markers per player and three tetrahedral dice, functioning as a race game more akin to modern backgammon than to checkers. The gameplay mechanics of these games bear little resemblance to the jumping and capturing that define draughts.Egyptian sources have generated similar confusion. In the British Museum are specimens of ancient Egyptian checker-patterned boards, found with their pieces in burial chambers, games using these boards were played by the pharaoh Hatshepsut. Various sources cite carvings at the temple of Kurna, allegedly from 1400 BC, as evidence of ancient checkers. These roof-slab etchings have been attributed to multiple games: Alquerque, Nine Men's Morris, and Zamma. The presence of Coptic crosses in some diagrams casts doubt on their antiquity, since such symbols would not have appeared in 1400 BC. The carvings likely date from considerably later periods.
The Ancient Greeks and Romans played capture games which have some similarity to checkers, in that the goal is capture the opponent's pieces on a board of squares.
Alquerque
A more likely true ancestor to checkers is Alquerque, which was played on a distinctive 5×5 grid with intersecting lines. The 10th-century Arab scholar Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani mentioned a game called Quirkat or Al-Quirkat in his Kitab al-Aghani though he provided no rules. Al qirq was also the name for a game similar to nine men's morris. These games were brought to Spain by the Moors, where they became known as Alquerque, the Spanish derivation of the Arabic name. The 1283 Libro de los Juegos, commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile, offered actual gameplay instructions. The Libro de los Juegos describes Alquerque as a game for twelve pieces per side on twenty-five positions. Movement followed board lines to adjacent points. Capture occurred by jumping, potentially in multiple sequences. The text emphasizes that players should guard their pieces carefully, suggesting tactical depth.Determining whether Alquerque mandated forced captures proves difficult from the surviving Libro de los Juegos source. The manuscript describes how the first player must expose a piece and the second must capture it, but whether this represents a rule or simply describes optimal play remains unclear. Modern draughts players consider compulsory capture fundamental, but historical evidence suggests variations existed where capture remained optional.
The question of promotion—whether pieces reaching the opposite edge gained enhanced powers—similarly lacks clear documentation. Most contemporary historians believe Alquerque featured forward-only movement but debate whether promotion existed. The absence of any mention of promoted pieces in the Libro de los Juegos seems significant. Rule descriptions typically explain new piece types, yet the manuscript remains silent on this point.
The Transition to Chess boards
Sometime between the 13th and 16th centuries, draughts developed as an Alquerque game that migrated from the Alquerque grid to chess boards. This transition produced a curious split as the game developed along two distinct paths. In Europe, players adopted the checkered board and restricted movement to diagonal lines. This European game was already being played in 1100, probably in the south of France. This development led to what became English Draughts or Checkers. The diagonal-only movement introduced forced progress, as pieces advanced toward the opponent's back rank without possibility of cycling endlessly. This innovation came at the cost of half the board becoming unusable.In the Arab world, the game moved to plain 8×8 boards and retained orthogonal movement. This branch evolved into Turkish Draughts. The Turkish variant emerged with sophisticated rules, including the "long king", which was a promoted piece capable of moving multiple squares in any orthogonal direction. Both evolutionary paths sacrificed something from Alquerque's original design, since the original game allowed straight and diagonal movement. Each descendant specialized however, losing the combined movement patterns of the original.
European developments
The rule of crowning was used by the 13th century, as it is mentioned in the Philippe Mouskés's Chronique in 1243 when the game was known as Fierges, the name used for the chess queen. The pieces became known as "dames" when that name was also adopted for the chess queen.Between 1300 and 1600, European draughts underwent extensive experimentation. Players tested various rule combinations, debating fundamental mechanics such as mandatory capture and backward capture, as well as different powers for promoted pieces. Two major variants emerged: "le Jeu Forcé," which required captures, and "le Jeu Plaisant," where captures remained optional. The rule forcing players to take whenever possible was introduced in France, where these games became known as Jeu forcé, similar to modern American checkers. The game without forced capture became known as Le jeu plaisant de dames, the precursor of international checkers. Optional-capture draughts persisted for centuries.
Enforcement of enforced capture proved problematic. Rather than treating failure to capture as an illegal move, players developed "huffing"—removing the offending piece as punishment while still allowing the violation. Players could thus deliberately neglect captures when losing the non-capturing piece proved less damaging than executing the capture. Huffing could thus be used as a strategic weapon. Not until the late 19th century did European draughts finally abandon huffing, with English-speaking countries holding out longest.
The game called Polish Draughts emerged around 1700, though its origin story contains questionable elements. According to popular legend, the variant was invented in Paris around 1723 when a Polish courtier and a French officer expanded the board to 10×10 squares and introduced several refinements like backward capture, the long king, and mandatory majority capture. However, the evidence contradicts this popular narrative. A 1710 French-Dutch dictionary includes the phrase "Can you play Polish draughts?" This predates the supposed Parisian invention by over a decade. The name's origin thus remains mysterious.
Polish Draughts became International Draughts, also known as Continental Draughts, the most widely played variant outside English-speaking countries. It incorporated:
- A 10×10 board with fifty playing squares
- Compulsory capture with majority precedence
- Flying kings that could move multiple squares diagonally
- Backward capturing by both regular pieces and kings
- Immediate promotion where pieces reaching the back rank became kings during the same turn