How to Play Checkers

Checkers, called draughts in the UK, is a two-player strategy game played on an 8×8 board. Each player has 12 pieces that move diagonally forward, jump over the other side’s pieces to capture them, and become kings when they reach the far side. You win by capturing all your opponent’s pieces or leaving them with no legal move. There is no luck involved, and the rules fit on one page. This guide covers how to play checkers under the standard American and English rules, how to set up the board, the king rules, the most common questions, and the strategy that wins games.

Checkers Rules at a Glance

How to Set Up a Checkers Board

1. Turn the board the right way. Each player should have a dark square in the corner on their left, which means a light square in the near-right corner.
2. Place 12 pieces each on the dark squares of the three rows nearest you: four pieces in each row.
3. Leave the two middle rows empty.
4. Black moves first. Decide who takes black by drawing lots or tossing a coin, and swap colours each game.

How to Play Checkers

1. Move. On your turn, move one piece one square diagonally forward onto an empty dark square. Pieces always stay on the dark squares.
2. Jump. If an opponent’s piece is diagonally in front of yours and the square directly beyond it is empty, jump over it and remove it from the board.
3. Keep jumping. If the same piece can then jump again, it must carry on, even changing direction, until there are no more jumps. That is a double or triple jump.
4. Jumping is compulsory. If you can capture, you must. If more than one capture is possible, you choose which one, but you must finish every jump in the line you choose.
5. Crown a king. When one of your pieces reaches the row furthest from you, it becomes a king: place one of your captured pieces on top of it. Reaching that row ends the turn, even in the middle of a jump.
6. Win. The game ends when one player has no pieces left or cannot make a legal move. That player loses.

King Rules in Checkers

• Kings move both ways. A king moves and jumps one square diagonally forwards or backwards. In American and English checkers it cannot fly across the board; that is a rule from international draughts.
• Kings can be captured like any other piece, by a man or another king.
• Crowning ends the move. A piece that jumps onto the far row is crowned there and can only use its new backwards moves on the next turn.
• Kings are stacked. A king is two pieces of the same colour, one on top of the other. Some sets have a crown on one side of each piece, so you flip it instead.

Common Questions About the Rules

Checkers and Draughts Around the World

Checkers is one member of a large family of draughts games. The main ones differ in board size and in what kings can do:

Checkers Strategy: How to Win

• Never leave a piece where it can be jumped. Before every move, check whether it gives your opponent a capture. It sounds basic, and it is the single biggest difference between winning and losing (see the odds below).
• Use the forced jump. Because captures are compulsory, you can offer one piece to drag an opponent’s piece into a spot where you jump two or three in return.
• Keep your back row. Pieces left on your own back row stop your opponent from crowning kings. Move them last.
• Control the centre. Pieces in the middle of the board have more moves and support each other; pieces on the edges can be attacked from only one side, but they also have fewer ways forward.
• Move in pairs. A piece with a friendly piece behind it on the diagonal cannot be jumped from that direction.
• Get a king, then trade. Once you are ahead in pieces, exchanging one for one brings you closer to a win.

Checkers Odds and Facts

Checkers was solved in 2007. A team led by Jonathan Schaeffer at the University of Alberta, whose program Chinook was first written in 1989, proved that with perfect play by both sides the game is always a draw. There are about 500 billion billion possible positions (500,995,484,682,338,672,639).

The number of possible games grows quickly. Black has 7 possible first moves; counting single moves by either player, the totals are:

Between ordinary players, two simple habits make the difference. In 10,000 simulated games between two players moving at random, Black won 48% and Red 52%, and a typical game lasted 28 moves each. A player who always took the biggest available capture did no better, winning 49%, because captures are compulsory anyway. But a player who also never left a piece where it could be jumped won 99.8% of games.

The shortest possible game of checkers lasts 20 moves: Martin Bryant’s exhaustive analysis in 2003 found 247 such games.

Where Checkers Comes From

Checkers most likely grew out of alquerque, a game played on a 5×5 grid of lines that the 10th-century Arabic Book of Songs mentions as al-qirkat and that the Moors brought to Spain. Moved onto a chessboard, it was probably being played in southern France by around 1100. The rule that captures are compulsory comes from France, where the game was called jeu forcé. The first book on the game in English, by the mathematician William Payne, appeared in 1756, and the world championship of English draughts dates back to the 1840s. Marion Tinsley, world champion from 1955 to 1962 and from 1975 to 1991, is widely considered the greatest checkers player ever; he beat Chinook in a match in 1992.

More Games to Try

For another strategy game for two, try mancala or backgammon. For tiles, see the dominoes guide, and for a race game with marbles for up to six players, Chinese checkers.

A board game with dice: Trouble, the race-and-chase game with the Pop-O-Matic die.

A strategy game with hidden pieces: Game of the Generals, the Filipino war game.

Checkers: frequently asked questions