Checkers

Checkers

Starting position for American checkers on an 8×8 checkerboard; Black (red) moves first.
Years active	at least 5,000
Genres	Board game Abstract strategy game Mind sport
Players	2
Setup time	<1 minute
Playing time	Casual games usually last 10 to 30 minutes; tournament games last anywhere from about 60 minutes to 3 hours or more.
Chance	None
Age range	6+
Skills	Strategy, tactics
Synonyms	draughts (or drafts) chequers

Checkers^{[note 1]} (American English), also known as draughts (/drɑːfts, dræfts/; British English), 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.^[1] 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".^[2]

The most popular forms of checkers in Anglophone countries are American checkers (also called English draughts), which is played on an 8×8 checkerboard; Russian draughts and Turkish draughts, both on an 8x8 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 (also locally known as dam) 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 would result in a draw.

Checkers is played by two opponents on opposite sides of the game board. One player has dark pieces (usually black); the other has light pieces (usually white or red). The darker color moves first, then players alternate turns. A player cannot move the opponent's pieces. A move consists of moving a piece forward to an adjacent unoccupied square. If the adjacent square contains an opponent's piece, and the square immediately beyond it is vacant, the piece may be captured (and removed from the game) by jumping over it.

Only the dark squares of the checkerboard are used. A piece can only move forward 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 (or muffin), and where there are two or more such positions the player forfeits pieces that cannot be moved (although some rule variations make capturing optional).^[3] 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.

An uncrowned piece (man) 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 in the same line and may "zigzag" (change diagonal direction). In American checkers, men can jump only forwards; in international draughts and Russian draughts, men can jump both forwards and backwards.

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 (in international checkers), 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 (also called flying kings) move any distance. They may capture an opposing man any distance away by jumping to any of the unoccupied squares immediately beyond it. Because jumped pieces remain on the board until the turn is complete, 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.

In most non-English languages (except those that acquired the game from English speakers), checkers is called dame, dames, damas, or a similar term that refers to ladies. The pieces are usually called men, stones, "peón" (pawn) 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" (dama), which is also one term for the queen in chess.^{[citation needed]}

Similar games have been played for millennia.^[2] A board resembling a checkers board was found in Ur dating from 3000 BC.^[4] In the British Museum are specimens of ancient Egyptian checkerboards, found with their pieces in burial chambers, and the game was played by the pharaoh Hatshepsut.^[2][5] Plato mentioned a game, πεττεία or petteia, as being of Egyptian origin,^[5] and Homer also mentions it.^[5] The method of capture was placing two pieces on either side of the opponent's piece. It was said to have been played during the Trojan War.^[6][7] The Romans played a derivation of petteia called latrunculi, or the game of the Little Soldiers. The pieces, and sporadically the game itself, were called calculi (pebbles).^[5][8] Like the pawn in Chess, Alquerque was probably derived from πεττεία and latrunculi by removing the necessity for two pieces to cooperate to capture one, although, like Ghanaian draughts, the game could still be declared lost by a player with only one piece left.

An Arabic game called Quirkat or al-qirq, with similar play to modern checkers, was played on a 5×5 board. It is mentioned in the tenth-century work Kitab al-Aghani.^[4] Al qirq was also the name for the game that is now called nine men's morris.^[9] Al qirq was brought to Spain by the Moors,^[10] where it became known as Alquerque, the Spanish derivation of the Arabic name. It was maybe adapted into a derivation of latrunculi, or the game of the Little Soldiers, with a leaping capture, which, like modern Argentine, German, Greek and Thai draughts, had flying kings which had to stop on the next square after the captured piece, but pieces could only make up to three captures at once, or seven if all directions were legal. That said, even if playing al qirq inside the cells of a square grid was not already known to the Moors who brought it, which it probably was, either via playing on a chessboard (in about 1100, probably in the south of France, this was done once again using backgammon pieces,^[11] thereby each piece was called a "fers", the same name as the chess queen, as the move of the two pieces was the same at the time)^[12] or adapting Seega using jumping capture. The rules are given in the 13th-century book Libro de los juegos.^[4]

The rule of crowning was used by the 13th century, as it is mentioned in the Philippe Mouskés's Chronique in 1243^[4] when the game was known as Fierges, the name used for the chess queen (derived from the Persian ferz, meaning royal counsellor or vizier). The pieces became known as "dames" when that name was also adopted for the chess queen.^[12] The rule forcing players to take whenever possible was introduced in France in around 1535, at which point the game became known as Jeu forcé, identical to modern American checkers.^[4][13] The game without forced capture became known as Le jeu plaisant de dames, the precursor of international checkers.

The 18th-century English author Samuel Johnson wrote a foreword to a 1756 book about checkers by William Payne, the earliest book in English about the game.^[5]

• Blue and Gray: On a 9×9 board, each side has 17 guard pieces that move and jump in any direction, to escort a captain piece which races to the centre of the board to win.^[14]
• Cheskers: A variant invented by Solomon Golomb. Each player begins with a bishop and a camel (which jumps with coordinates (3,1) rather than (2,1) so as to stay on the black squares), and men reaching the back rank promote to a bishop, camel, or king.^[15][16]
• Damath: A variant utilizing math principles and numbered chips popular in the Philippines.^[17]
• Dameo: A variant played on an 8×8 board that utilizes all 64 squares and has diagonal and orthogonal movement. A special "sliding" move is used for moving a line of checkers similar to the movement rule in Epaminondas. By Christian Freeling (2000).^[18][19][20]
• Hexdame: A literal adaptation of international draughts to a hexagonal gameboard. By Christian Freeling (1979).^[21]
• Lasca: A checkers variant on a 7×7 board, with 25 fields used. Jumped pieces are placed under the jumper, so that towers are built. Only the top piece of a jumped tower is captured. This variant was invented by World Chess Champion Emanuel Lasker.^[22]
• Philosophy shogi checkers: A variant on a 9×9 board, game ending with capturing opponent's king. Invented by Inoue Enryō and described in Japanese book in 1890.^[23]
• Suicide checkers (also called Anti-Checkers, Giveaway Checkers or Losing Draughts): A variant where the objective of each player is to lose all of their pieces.^[24][25]
• Tiers: A complex variant which allows players to upgrade their pieces beyond kings.^{[citation needed]}
• Vigman's draughts: Each player has 24 pieces (two full sets) – one on the light squares, a second set on dark squares. Each player plays two games simultaneously: one on light squares, the other on dark squares. The total result is the sum of results for both games.^{[citation needed]}

American checkers (English draughts) has been the arena for several notable advances in game artificial intelligence. In 1951 Christopher Strachey wrote the first video game program on checkers. The checkers program tried to run for the first time on 30 July 1951 at NPL, but was unsuccessful due to program errors. In the summer of 1952 he successfully ran the program on Ferranti Mark 1 computer and played the first computer checkers and arguably the first video game ever according to certain definitions. In the 1950s, Arthur Samuel created one of the first board game-playing programs of any kind. More recently, in 2007 scientists at the University of Alberta^[26] developed their "Chinook" program to the point where it is unbeatable. A brute force approach that took hundreds of computers working nearly two decades was used to solve the game,^[27] showing that a game of checkers will always end in a draw if neither player makes a mistake.^[28][29] The solution is for the checkers variation called go-as-you-please (GAYP) checkers and not for the variation called three-move restriction checkers, however it is a legal three-move restriction game because only openings believed to lose are barred under the three-move restriction. As of December 2007, this makes American checkers the most complex game ever solved.

In November 1983, the Science Museum Oklahoma (then called the Omniplex) unveiled a new exhibit: Lefty the Checker Playing Robot. Programmed by Scott M Savage, Lefty used an Armdroid robotic arm by Colne Robotics and was powered by a 6502 processor with a combination of Basic and Assembly code to interactively play a round of checkers with visitors to the museum. Originally, the program was deliberately simple so that the average museum visitor could potentially win, but over time was improved. The improvements however proved to be more frustrating for the visitors, so the original code was reimplemented.^[30]

Generalized Checkers is played on an M × N board.

It is PSPACE-hard to determine whether a specified player has a winning strategy. And if a polynomial bound is placed on the number of moves that are allowed in between jumps (which is a reasonable generalisation of the drawing rule in standard Checkers), then the problem is in PSPACE, thus it is PSPACE-complete.^[31] However, without this bound, Checkers is EXPTIME-complete.^[32]

However, other problems have only polynomial complexity:^[31]

• Can one player remove all the other player's pieces in one move (by several jumps)?
• Can one player king a piece in one move?

• 
  10x10 board, starting position in international draughts
• 
  8x8 board, starting position in English, Brazilian, Czech and Russian draughts, as well as Pool checkers
• 
  12x12 board, starting position in Canadian draughts
• 
  8x8 board, starting position in Turkish and Armenian draughts
• 
  8x8 board, starting position in Italian and Portuguese draughts
• 
  8x8 board, starting position and example play in Bashni

International draughts / American Pool checkers family

National variant	Board size	Pieces per side	Double-corner or light square on player's near-right?	First move	Capture constraints	Notes
International draughts (or Polish draughts)	10×10	20, originally 15	Yes	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces.	Pieces promote only when ending their move on the final rank, not when passing through it. It is mainly played in the Netherlands, Suriname, France, Belgium, some eastern European countries, some parts of Africa, some parts of the former USSR, and other European countries.
Ghanaian draughts (or damii)	10×10	20	No[33]	White	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made. Overlooking a king's capture opportunity leads to forfeiture of the king.	Played in Ghana. Having only a single piece remaining (man or king) loses the game. It is similar to 10x10 Czech Draughts, but has backwards capture and allows winning by removing all but one piece, similar to Latrunculi.
Frisian draughts	10×10	20	Yes	White	A sequence of capture must give the maximum "value" to the capture, and a king (called a wolf) has a value of less than two men but more than one man. If a sequence with a capturing wolf and a sequence with a capturing man have the same value, the wolf must capture. The main difference with the other games is that the captures can be made diagonally, but also straight forwards and sideways.	Played primarily in Friesland (Dutch province) historically, but in the last decade spreading rapidly over Europe (e.g. the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia) and Africa, as a result of a number of recent international tournaments and the availability of an iOS and Android app "Frisian Draughts".
Canadian checkers	12×12	30	Yes	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces.	International rules on a 12×12 board. Played mainly in Canada.
Brazilian draughts (or derecha)	8×8	12	Yes	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces.	Played in Brazil. The rules come from international draughts, but board size and number of pieces come from American checkers.
Filipino Checkers (or dama)	8×8	12	Two variations exist: one with the double-corner on player's near-right and the other on player's near-left.	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces.	Played in the Philippines. Similar to Brazilian Draughts but with some specifics. Usually played on a dama matrix (crossed lined board representing only the diagonals) and comes in two orientations.
Pool checkers	8×8	12	Yes	Black	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	Also called Spanish Pool checkers. It is mainly played in the southeastern United States; traditional among African American players. A man reaching the kings row is promoted only if he does not have additional backwards jumps (as in international draughts).[1][2] In an ending with three kings versus one king, the player with three kings must win in thirteen moves or the game is a draw.
Jamaican draughts/checkers	8×8	12	No	Black	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	Similar to Pool checkers with the exception of the main diagonal on the right instead of the left. A man reaching the kings row is promoted only if he does not have additional backwards jumps (as in international draughts). In an ending with three kings versus one king, the player with three kings must win in thirteen moves or the game is a draw.
Russian draughts	8×8	12	Yes	White	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	Also called shashki or Russian shashki checkers. It is mainly played in the former USSR and in Israel. Rules are similar to international draughts, except: a man that enters the kings row during a jump and can continue to jump backwards, jumps backwards as a king, not as a man; choosing a sequence that captures the maximum possible number of pieces is not required. There is also a 10×8 board variant (with two additional columns labelled i and k) and the give-away variant Poddavki. There are official championships for shashki and its variants.
Mozambican draughts/checkers	8×8	12	No	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces. Although, a king has the weight of two pieces, this means with two captures, one of a king and one of a piece, one must choose the king; two captures, one of a king and one of two pieces, the player can choose; two captures with one of a king and one of three pieces, the player must capture the three pieces; two captures, one of two kings and one of three pieces, one must choose the kings...	Also called "Dama" or "Damas". It is played along all of the region of Mozambique. In an ending with three kings versus one king, the player with three kings must win in thirteen moves or the game is a draw.
Tobit	6×4 grid	12	—	White	Mandatory Capture and Maximum Capture	Played on a unique non-rectangular or square board of grids with 20 grid points and 18 endpoints. Played in the Republic of Khakassia. Movement and capture is orthogonal with backwards capture. The "Tobit," a promoted piece, moves like the King in Turkish draughts.
Keny	8×8	16	—		Variable; Most rules have mandatory capture without maximum capture	Keny (Russian: Кены) is a draughts game played in the Caucasus and nearby areas of Turkey. It is played on an 8x8 grid with orthogonal movement. It is similar to Turkish Draughts, but has backwards capture and allows for men to jump over friendly pieces without capturing them similar to Dameo.

Spanish draughts family

National variant	Board size	Pieces per side	Double-corner or light square on player's near-right?	First move	Capture constraints	Notes
Spanish draughts	8×8	12	Light square is on right, but double corner is on left, as play is on the light squares. (Play on the dark squares with dark square on right is Portuguese draughts.)	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces, and the maximum possible number of kings from all such sequences.	Also called Spanish checkers. It is mainly played in Portugal, some parts of South America, and some Northern African countries.
Argentinian draughts	8×8 10x10	12 15	No	White	The rules are similar to the Spanish game, but a sequence that the king can capture must be captured first of all sequences of the same number of pieces.[3]	The rules are similar to the Spanish game, but the king, when it captures, must stop directly after the captured piece, and may begin a new capture movement from there. With this rule, there is no draw with two kings versus one.
Malaysian/Singaporean checkers	12×12	30	Yes	Not fixed	Captures are mandatory. Failing to capture results in forfeiture of that piece (huffing).	Mainly played in Malaysia, Singapore, and the region nearby. Also known locally as "Black–White Chess". Sometimes it is played on an 8×8 board when a 12×12 board is unavailable; a 10×10 board is rare in this region.
Czech draughts Slovak draughts	8×8 10x10?	12 15? 8	Yes	White	If there are sequences of captures with either a man or a king, the king must be chosen. After that, any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	This variant is from the family of the Spanish game. Slovak variant is occasionally mislabeled as Hungarian
Hungarian Highlander draughts	8×8	8		White	All pieces are long-range. Jumping is mandatory after first move of the rook. Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	The uppermost symbol of the cube determines its value, which is decreased after being jumped. Having only one piece remaining loses the game.
Thai draughts	8×8	8	Yes	Black	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	During a capturing move, pieces are removed immediately after capture. Kings stop on the square directly behind the piece captured and must continue capturing from there, if possible, even in the direction where they come from.
German draughts (or Dame)	8×8	12	Yes	Black	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	Kings stop on the square directly behind the piece captured and must continue capturing from there as long as possible.
Turkish draughts	8×8	16	—	White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces. Captured pieces are removed immediately so that a sequence may even in the direction where the capturing piece comes from	Also known as Dama. Men move straight forwards or sideways, instead of diagonally. When a man reaches the last row, it is promoted to a flying king (Dama), which moves like a rook (or a queen in the Armenian variant). The pieces start on the second and third rows. It is played in Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Greece, and several other locations in the Middle East, as well as in the same locations as Russian checkers. There are several variants in these countries, with the Armenian variant (called tama) allowing also forward-diagonal movement of men and the Greek requiring the king to stop directly after the captured piece. With this rule, there is no draw with one king and men versus one king.
Myanmar draughts	8×8	12		White	A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces.	Players agree before starting the game between "Must Capture" or "Free Capture". In the "Must Capture" type of game, a man that fails to capture is forfeited (huffed). In the "Free Capture" game, capturing is optional.
Tanzanian draughts	8×8	12	Yes	Not fixed	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.

American straight checkers / English draughts family

National variant	Board size	Pieces per side	Double-corner or light square on player's near-right?	First move	Capture constraints	Notes
American checkers	8×8 10x10	12 15	Yes	Black	Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made.	Also called "straight checkers" in the United States, or "English draughts" in the United Kingdom.
Italian draughts	8×8 10x10	12 15	No	White	Men cannot jump kings. A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces. If more than one sequence qualifies, the capture must be done with a king instead of a man. If more than one sequence qualifies, the one that captures a greater number of kings must be chosen. If there are still more sequences, the one that captures a king first must be chosen.	It is mainly played in Italy and some North African countries. Old French draughts is the same game without the obligation to jump kings with a king.
Gothic checkers (or Altdeutsches Damespiel or Altdeutsche Dame)	8×8	16	—	White	Captures are mandatory.	All 64 squares are used, dark and light. Men move one cell diagonally forward and capture in any of the five cells directly forward, diagonally forward, or sideways, but not backward. Men promote on the last row. Kings may move and attack in any of the eight directions. There is also a variant with flying kings.

Column draughts (Russian towers), also known as Bashni, is a kind of draughts, known in Russia since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in which the game is played according to the usual rules of Russian draughts, but with the difference that the captured man is not removed from the playing field: rather, it is placed under the capturing piece (man or tower).

The resulting towers move around the board as a whole, "obeying" the upper piece. When taking a tower, only the uppermost piece is removed from it: and the resulting tower belongs to one player or the other according to the color of its new uppermost piece.

Bashni has inspired the games Lasca and Emergo.

• World Checkers/Draughts Championship in American checkers since 1840
• Draughts World Championship in international draughts since 1885
• Women's World Draughts Championship in international draughts since 1873
• Draughts-64 World Championships since 1985

• World Draughts Federation (FMJD) was founded in 1947 by four Federations: France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland.^[34]
• International Draughts Federation (IDF) was established in 2012 in Bulgaria.^[35]

• Halma: A game in which pieces move in any direction and jump over any other piece, friend or enemy (but with no captures), and players try to move them all into an opposite corner.
• Chinese checkers: Based on Halma, but uses a star-shaped board divided into equilateral triangles.
• Kōnane: "Hawaiian checkers".

• List of draughts players
• Fanorona
• Chess

Draughts associations and federations

History, articles, variants, rules

• A Guide to Checkers Families and Rules by Sultan Ratrout
• The history of checkers/draughts
• Jim Loy's checkers pages with many links and articles.
• Checkers Maven, CheckersUSA checkers books, electronic editions
• The Checkers Family
• Alemanni Checkers Pages
• On the evolution of Draughts variants
• "Chess and Draughts/Checkers" by Edward Winter

Online play

• mindoku.com Play online draughts, Russian draughts or giveaway draughts. Online tournaments every day.
• Server for playing correspondence tournaments
• A free program that allows you to play more than 20 kinds of draughts
• A free Application that allows you to play 15 popular checkers variants with a human or a computer
• Draughts.org Play online draughts plus information on strategies and history.
• Lidraughts.org Internet draughts server, similar to the popular chess server lichess.org