How Draughts Works

The board and the men

Eight squares by eight, alternately light and dark, and only the thirty-two dark squares are ever used. Each player starts with twelve men filling the three rows nearest them, which leaves the two middle rows empty and exactly eight vacant dark squares between the two armies. The sides alternate turns from there. There is no dice, no card, no hidden information and no luck in the game whatsoever: both players can see everything, so every result is somebody having calculated further than the other.

Forward only, until the far row

A man moves one square diagonally forward onto an empty square. It cannot move sideways, cannot move backwards and cannot stand on a light square, which are three ways of saying the same thing. Reach the far row and the man is crowned and becomes a king, and a king moves one square diagonally in any of the four directions. That is the whole of the promotion: an English king is not a long-range piece and does not slide down an open diagonal.

The consequence most beginners miss is a defensive one. Since a man never captures backwards, a man that has slipped past an enemy man can never be taken by it, and only a king can come back for it. That single fact governs how the two lines of men grind past each other in the middle of the game.

A capture you cannot decline

A capture is a jump: your piece hops over an adjacent enemy piece and lands on the empty square directly beyond it, in a straight diagonal line, and the piece jumped is removed. If a capture is available anywhere on the board it must be made, and you do not get to play a quiet move instead. If the piece that has just jumped can jump again from where it landed, it must, and it goes on until it cannot. All of that is one turn.

Two details settle the awkward cases. A piece may not be jumped twice in one sequence, and a piece already jumped stays on the board until the turn is finished, so it also blocks the square it is standing on. The one square that does come free is the square the jumping piece started from, since it left it, which is how a long circling sequence can finish exactly where it began.

Longest is not required

Where two different captures are available you may take either. Where two jump sequences are available and one is longer, you may still take the shorter. This is worth stating plainly because it is precisely where the ten-by-ten international game differs: there you are obliged to play the sequence that takes the most pieces, and a player raised on that game will hunt for the same obligation here and not find it. The compulsion in the English game is that you capture, never how much you capture.

Crowned in mid-jump, and the turn stops

The rule that catches out the most people, including a good many programs. If a man lands on the far row part-way through a multiple jump, it is crowned there and the turn ends immediately, even when the piece, now a king, could plainly carry on jumping backwards. It does not carry on. The new king waits, and its first move as a king comes on your next turn. The difference is not small: the same position with a piece that was already a king allows the continuation, and the man does not.

How a game ends

You win by taking all of your opponent pieces, or by leaving them with no legal move at all. The second is a genuine win rather than a draw: a player with pieces still on the board but every one of them blocked has lost, and cornering the last man is a perfectly respectable way to finish. Draws come by agreement, by repetition, or when neither side is making progress. That last one has to be defined for a machine, so the boards here count eighty consecutive turns, forty from each player, in which nothing was captured and no man moved. The counter resets on any capture and on any move by a man, so it only runs when two kings are genuinely circling each other with nothing to show for it. Learning how to play draughts ends there. Everything after that is practice.