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Checkers
Board · Classics · plays in your browser, no download
One kind of piece, one kind of move, and captures you are not allowed to refuse. Checkers looks like the simple cousin of chess and is the game that took a computer eighteen years to finish.
Where it comes from
The ancestor is alquerque, a capture-by-jumping game played on a five-by-five grid of lines across the medieval Mediterranean, and before that in the Arab world. Somewhere in twelfth- or thirteenth-century France somebody put alquerque’s pieces and its jump onto a chessboard and let them move only forwards. The French called it jeu de dames, the game of ladies, because a piece that reaches the far side is promoted the way a queen is — which is where English gets draughts and king, and Italian dama.
Two rules split the family afterwards, and they matter more than they sound. Must you capture when you can? In the English game, yes — and a game where a third of your moves are forced is a game where you win by arranging for your opponent to be forced into the one he does not want. How far does a king fly? One square in the English game, any distance in the international and Italian versions, which is a genuinely different endgame.
Then the computers arrived, and checkers became the setting for one of the longest pieces of work in the history of artificial intelligence. Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta started on a program called Chinook in 1989. On 29 April 2007 they announced the finish: roughly a hundred million million positions later, checkers was solved. Played perfectly by both sides, from the opening position, the game is a draw.
That result changes how you should read an opponent you cannot beat. A program playing perfect checkers is not unbeatable because it is clever. It is undefeatable because the game itself has no win in it — and every game you lose, you lost by making the first mistake.
How to play
| Moving | One square diagonally forward, onto an empty dark square. |
|---|---|
| Capturing | Jump an enemy piece into the empty square behind it. More than one in a turn if the jumps line up. |
| Compulsory | If a capture is available you must take it. This is the rule the whole game hangs on. |
| Kings | Reach the far row and your piece is crowned: it may now move and jump backwards too. |
| Winning | Take everything, or leave your opponent with no legal move. |
Our version
Eight by eight with compulsory capture, in four strengths. The strongest one will not lose a game you had any right to win.
Three things that help
Offer a piece to win two. Because capture is compulsory, a piece left where it must be taken is not a blunder, it is bait: your opponent has no choice, and the jump puts him where your second jump is waiting.
Hold your back row for as long as you can. The two squares at the corners of your own edge stop enemy pieces being crowned. Giving them up early is how beginners hand over the endgame.
Count before you trade. Even exchanges favour whoever is already ahead, because the board empties and there is less to hide behind. Trade when you are up, avoid it when you are down.