Checkers

One game, two names, more than one rulebook

The name changes across the Atlantic. The rules change too, but not in the same place, and that mismatch is the source of most of the confusion. What is played on eight-by-eight boards in Britain, Ireland, North America and much of the Commonwealth is a single game wearing two labels, so searching for checkers online and searching for its British name lands you in the same place. What is played on ten-by-ten boards across much of continental Europe is a related but genuinely different game that happens to share the shape. The two diverge on exactly three rules: two of them about how much power a piece has, and one about how much choice you get when you capture.

The kings here do not fly

Crown a man on this board and it gains one thing: it can now move and capture backwards as well as forwards. It still travels one square at a time and it still lands on the square immediately beyond whatever it takes. In the ten-by-ten game a crowned piece is a flying king that slides any distance along an open diagonal and may land any distance past the piece it captures, which makes a single crowning worth several times more and turns the endgame into a different subject altogether. Expect the short king here. It is the English rule and it is what this board plays.

Men do not capture backwards

The second divergence, and the one that costs material. In the English game a man captures only in the direction it moves, which is forwards. Slip a man past an enemy man and that man can never take it, ever; only a king can come back for it. On a ten-by-ten board men capture in all four directions and no piece is ever safe simply for being behind something. Coming from the continental game you will spend the first few turns seeing captures for your opponent that do not exist, and then lose a piece to a king because you had filed the square behind an enemy man as dangerous when it was not.

You may take the shorter capture

The third divergence, and the one that trips a continental player the other way round. Where two capture sequences are open to you on this board and one of them takes more pieces, you may play either. The compulsion in the English game is that you capture at all, never how much you capture. On a ten-by-ten board the longest sequence is obligatory, so a player raised on that hunts for the same obligation, finds this board offering both, and assumes the software is letting them off. It is not: taking the shorter jump is legal here, and it is occasionally the better move, because what matters is where your piece finishes rather than how many it collected on the way. The rule is set out with the rest of them on the rules page.

Writing a game down

Published games are recorded by numbering the thirty-two playing squares from one to thirty-two and writing moves as a pair, so an opening looks like a row of number pairs rather than anything resembling chess notation. This board does not use that scheme: it announces each square in chess-style file-and-rank coordinates, which is what a screen reader will say as you walk the arrow keys across the dark squares. If you want to follow a published game move by move, keep the numbered diagram beside you, because the two systems agree on the board and on nothing else.

Before either rule bites, the boards are different sizes

The two rules above are what people argue about, but the first thing a continental player notices is cruder and arrives sooner. This board is eight squares by eight, which makes thirty-two of them dark, and each side fills three rows with twelve men, leaving exactly eight empty dark squares between the armies. The ten-by-ten game has fifty dark squares and twenty men a side across four rows, and leaves ten empty. Two-thirds again as many pieces, on a board with half again as many squares to lose them on.

The effect is on the clock rather than on the rulebook. An English opening runs out of quiet moves quickly, the first forced exchange arrives within a few turns, and a game that is going to turn on a crowning usually gets there while there are still men on the board to be crowned. It is why the short king costs you as much as it does here and costs less over there: on this board the crown arrives early and often, and a piece that can only step one square is what you are left holding for the rest of the game.