Checkers

Objective

Either capture all of your opponent's pieces or block them so they cannot make any legal moves.

Setup

The game is played on an 8 x 8 grid of alternating dark and light squares. Pieces move only on the dark squares.
One player controls the Red pieces and the other controls the Black pieces.
Red opens the game and always takes the first turn. Players then alternate turns.

Rules

Diagonal Advancement: On a standard turn, you can move one of your pieces forward diagonally into an adjacent, unoccupied dark square.
Direction: Standard pieces can only move forward (toward your opponent's side of the board). They can never move backward.
How to Capture: If an opponent's piece is in a diagonal square next to yours, and the square directly behind it is empty, you must jump over it. The captured piece is then removed from the board.
Captures are Mandatory: If a jump is available anywhere on the board on your turn, you cannot make a standard move. You are forced to take the capture.
Chained Jumps: If the piece you just jumped with lands in a position to make another legal jump over another opponent's piece, you must continue jumping until no more captures are possible. This entire chain counts as a single turn.
Crowning a King: When one of your pieces successfully reaches the very last row on the opponent's side of the board, its forward journey is complete. The piece is immediately crowned and becomes a King.
King Powers: Unlike regular pieces, a King is no longer restricted to forward-only movement. A King may move and capture diagonally in either direction (forward or backward), making it a powerful tool for dominating the board.

History

Checkers—or draughts (pronounced "drafts") as it's known to most of the English-speaking world—is one of the oldest board games in human history. While it might look like a simple game you play with your grandparents, its roots stretch back over 5,000 years, tracing a path through ancient empires, medieval innovations, and modern computer science.

3000 BCE: The Birth in Ur

Ancient Mesopotamia: Archaeologists in the 1920s discovered an ancient board game in the Royal Tombs of Ur (modern-day Iraq) that used a grid-like layout and circular gaming pieces. A similar 3x10 grid game called Senet was wildly popular in ancient Egypt during this same era, laying the conceptual groundwork for modern grid-and-piece games.

1400 BCE: Alquerque

Ancient Egypt & Greece: The closest direct ancestor to checkers emerged as a game called Alquerque. Played on a 5x5 grid with intersecting lines, players moved pieces along the lines and jumped over an opponent’s piece to capture it. The game spread across the Mediterranean and was adopted by the Greeks and Romans.

1100 CE: Merging with the Chessboard

Medieval France: An unknown inventor in Southern France made a brilliant tweak: they took the rules of Alquerque but adapted them to be played entirely on the dark squares of a standard 8x8 chessboard. The game was originally called Fierges (the medieval name for the chess queen, mirroring how the pieces moved).

1535: The Crowning of Kings

Renaissance Spain: The game evolved further into Dames. Around this time, a game-changing rule was introduced: if a piece managed to make it all the way to the opponent's back row, it was "crowned" and gained the power to move backward. This transformed the strategy and pace of the game.

1756: The First Rulebook

Great Britain: William Payne, a British mathematician, published the very first official guide to the game, cementing standard rules for what the English called Draughts and Americans came to call Checkers (named after the checkered pattern of the board).

2007: Solved by AI

Modern Era: Computer scientist Jonathan Schaeffer and his team ran a program called Chinook continuously for 18 years to map out every single possible scenario in the game. They officially "solved" checkers, proving that if both sides play a perfectly flawless game, the match will always end in a draw.

What's in a name?

The American name "checkers" comes from the French word echecs (chess), which refers to the grid pattern. The British name "draughts" comes from the old Germanic verb dagan, meaning "to draw" or "to move."

Today, checkers remains a global staple. Its transition from ancient stone boards in Royal Tombs to the digital pixels of modern smartphones proves that deep, engaging strategy doesn't require overly complicated rules.