Jump, capture, crown in Checkers
Checkers — draughts — is the classic game of diagonal moves and flying captures on an 8×8 board. Slide your discs forward, leap over your opponent to capture, chain multi-jumps, and crown a king when you reach the far side. Play the built-in computer on three levels or hand the device back and forth with a friend.
How to play
Checkers in 4 steps
Move diagonally
Tap one of your discs to select it, then tap a highlighted dark square. Ordinary men step one square diagonally forward.
Jump to capture
When an enemy disc sits diagonally next to yours with an empty square beyond, leap over it to capture and remove it from the board.
Chain your jumps
If another capture is available with the same piece after a jump, you must keep jumping. Captures are compulsory — if a jump exists, you have to take one.
Crown a king
Reach the opponent's back row and your man becomes a king, marked with a ring. Kings move and capture both forward and backward. Capture or block every enemy piece to win.
Controls
- Tap / click piece
- Select a disc to move
- Tap / click square
- Move to a highlighted square
- Mode buttons
- Switch difficulty or 2-player
- New
- Start a new game
Strategy
Tips to play better
Hold the back row
Keep your two back-row men in place early. They stop the opponent from crowning a king, and a king is worth far more than the tempo you spend defending.
Control the centre
Discs in the middle of the board influence more squares and have more escape routes. Pieces shoved to the edges can only move one way and are easily trapped.
Force the trade you want
Because captures are compulsory, you can offer a disc to drag an enemy into a square where you immediately jump back — often winning a piece on the exchange.
Push for kings
A king's backward movement roughly doubles its power. In the endgame, racing a man to the back row often decides the result, so clear a lane and crown.
About Checkers
Checkers descends from Alquerque, a capturing game played around the Mediterranean over a thousand years ago. By the 12th century someone had moved the pieces onto a chessboard and added forced captures, producing the game played today across the world as checkers or draughts.
Despite its simple rules it is deep enough to have occupied mathematicians for decades. In 2007, after eighteen years of computation, the Chinook project announced that checkers had been "solved": with perfect play by both sides the game is a draw. That makes it the largest game ever fully solved at the time, and a milestone in artificial intelligence.
This Unicode edition renders the board and discs entirely from recoloured circle glyphs, with kings marked by a glowing ring. The computer opponent searches ahead with a minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning — shallow on easy, deeper on hard — weighing material, kings and advancement. Play it solo on three levels or pass-and-play locally with a friend.
FAQ
Checkers questions
How do I move and capture?
Are captures forced?
How do kings work?
Can I play against a friend?
How do I win?
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