Ten by ten.
You must take.
International draughts — the game with a world championship, not the one on the back of the chessboard. Twenty men a side, capture in every direction, kings that fly the whole diagonal, and the rule that decides everything: if you can take, you must, and you must take the most.
Play it now ▸ — solo against the machine for the highscore board, or 1 on 1 with somebody on the network.
International draughts on the 10×10 board, where capture is compulsory, you must always take the most, and a king flies the whole diagonal. Five machines are waiting on the board.
Where the game came from
Draughts is older than modern chess. Boards of the same family turn up in Ur and in pharaonic Egypt, but the game played today took its shape in twelfth-century France, where somebody set the pieces of alquerque on a chessboard and let them move only forwards. It reached Spain and Britain within a century or two, and by 1547 it had its first printed book of analysis.
The board grew in the eighteenth century. Around 1723 the game was moved to ten squares by ten in Paris — the story attaches it to a Polish officer at the court of Louis XV, which is why the French still call it *le jeu de dames à la polonaise* and nobody in Poland does. The larger board doubled the men, allowed men to capture backwards, and turned a simple race into a game of combinations up to a dozen moves deep.
It is now the competitive form almost everywhere outside the English-speaking world. The Netherlands, France, Russia, Latvia and Belarus all have deep traditions in it — and so, emphatically, does West Africa: Senegal and Ivory Coast have both produced world champions, and Senegal has held the world title. The 8×8 English game has the wider recognition in Britain and America, and it is also the smaller game in every other sense — it was solved as a draw in 2007 by eighteen years of computation. Nobody has solved this one.
How to play draughts
- Each side has twenty men on the fifty dark squares — four rows each, with two empty rows between. Teal moves first, up the board; sand moves down. Only the dark squares are ever used, which is why they are the lit ones here.
- A man moves one square diagonally forwards to an empty square. That is the only thing it may do that is not a capture.
- A man captures by jumping an enemy piece into the empty square directly beyond it — forwards *or* backwards. If it can jump again from where it lands, it must, and the whole chain is a single move.
- Capturing is compulsory, and so is taking the maximum. If one sequence takes four pieces and another takes two, four is the only legal move on the board — this game will not offer you the other one, because it is not a move.
- What you jump stays on the board until your move is over. It cannot be jumped a second time, and it still blocks squares. This is the Turkish strike, and it is the rule that decides where most long chains actually stop.
- A man that *finishes* its move on the far row becomes a king. Passing over the far row mid-chain does not crown it — it stays a man for the rest of that move, and for the rest of the game.
- A king slides any distance along a diagonal, and captures at a distance: it may cross any number of empty squares, jump one enemy piece, and land on any empty square beyond — then keep going.
- You lose when you cannot move, whether that is because you have nothing left or because everything you have is blocked. A game is drawn if twenty-five moves each go by with only kings moving and nothing taken, or if the same position comes up three times.
What good players do
The first thing to understand is that compulsory capture is not a restriction, it is the weapon. A strong player does not wait for a mistake; they *give* a piece away so that the forced recapture drags an enemy man onto a square where a three- or four-piece chain is waiting. Everything tactical in this game is that idea, and it is why an offered piece is the most dangerous thing on the board.
The second is that a chain is a calculation, not a sight. Because captured pieces stay standing until the move ends, the same combination can be worth four pieces or two depending on which order the jumps are taken in, and which one you are allowed to play is decided by the maximum rule rather than by preference. Reading it wrong is not usually a lost piece — it is a lost game, because the reply is another chain.
The third is structure. A wall of men that keeps its back row intact is very hard to break, because each hole in that row is a promotion square handed to the other side. Beginners push forwards; the men that win games are usually the ones that stayed.
And then there is the king. The first king on the board is frequently decisive, because it covers a whole diagonal from anywhere on it and a man cannot answer that. Most of the middlegame is really an argument about who gets one, and most endings are a matter of whether the side with a king can trap the side without.
Questions
Is draughts the same as checkers?
Same family, two names, and — importantly — several different games. “Checkers” usually means the 8×8 English or American game; “draughts” in most of the world means the 10×10 international game, which is what this board plays. The differences are real rather than cosmetic: on 10×10 there are twenty men a side rather than twelve, men capture backwards as well as forwards, kings fly any distance along a diagonal, and you are obliged to take the maximum number of pieces available. The result is a much deeper game with far longer combinations.
Do I really have to capture?
Yes, always, and you must take the sequence that captures the most pieces. There is no choice about it and no penalty for “refusing” — refusing is simply not a legal move, so this board will not let you make one. If two different sequences take the same number, you may play either; quantity alone decides it, and unlike Italian rules there is no preference for capturing with a king or for taking kings.
What happens to the pieces I jump over in a long capture?
They stay exactly where they are until your move is finished, and only then come off the board. That means a piece you have already jumped still blocks the square it is on, and you may not jump it a second time. It is called the coup turc, the Turkish strike, and it is the reason a chain that looks like it should take eight sometimes only takes five. This board draws the pieces you have jumped still standing, with a ring round them, for exactly that reason.
When does a man become a king?
When it finishes a move on the opponent’s back row. If a capture chain passes through that row and carries on, the man is not crowned — it stays a man for the rest of the move and for the rest of the game. This trips people up, and it matters: an engine that crowned mid-chain would let the new king carry on capturing at range from a square it never earned.
How hard are the machines?
There are five, on the same ladder as every other board here: PROBE, DRONE, SENTINEL, WARDEN and OVERMIND. The bottom rung sees the piece in front of it and walks into the shot behind it; the top rung searches fourteen moves deep in the forced sequences this game is full of, never makes a deliberate mistake, and will take a loose man immediately. Beating any of them puts that machine on the highscore board, and only your hardest win counts. Because draughts between strong players is very often drawn, holding OVERMIND to a draw scores half a win — which is worth more than beating the machine below it.
Can I play draughts against another person?
Yes. Choose draughts as your game and search for an opponent, and you queue on draughts as your topic — the next person looking for the same game lands in a conversation with you and the board opens between you. You are on video while you play unless you turn your camera off, which is rather the point: it is a game to talk over.
Do I need to download anything?
No. It runs in the browser, it is free, and it works on a phone — the board is playable by tapping, and by keyboard if you would rather. You need an account to record a run on the highscore board or to play another person, because both of those attach a result to somebody.
The rest of the arcade
Pong, Tetris, Chess, Oware and Snake. All of them play the same two ways: against a machine or against a person.