Draughts

Four men can move, and there are seven ways to do it

The opening position looks like twenty-four pieces and no information. It is much narrower than that. A man moves one square diagonally forward and does nothing else, so the eight men standing behind the front row have nowhere to go at all: every square in front of them is occupied by their own side. Only the four men on the row nearest the middle can move. Three of them have two moves each, and the fourth stands on the outside file, where one of its two diagonals runs off the edge of the board, so it has one. Seven moves in total, and every game of draughts ever played began with one of them.

The board draws a faint circle on every piece that has a legal move, so you can see that count without doing the arithmetic. Keep watching that circle for the rest of the game. It is doing more work than it looks: the moment a capture becomes available anywhere on your side, the circle appears on the pieces that can take and vanishes from everything else.

A capture you are not allowed to refuse

This is the rule that separates English draughts from the games it resembles, and a new player runs into it within about four moves. If you can capture, you must. Not may, must. A piece with a jump available cannot be left standing while you improve your position somewhere quieter, and if it lands where it can jump again, it has to keep jumping until there is nothing left to take. The whole sequence counts as one turn.

The board enforces that instead of mentioning it. While a capture exists it is the only kind of move on offer: the pieces that can take are the ones wearing the circle, every other piece is inert, and touching one puts a line under the board saying that a capture is available and that in draughts captures are compulsory. None of that is the board being fussy. A program that let you slide quietly out of trouble would be playing a different game, and every player of this one would spot it immediately.

Once you stop resenting the rule it turns into a weapon. Because your opponent has no choice, a piece deliberately offered is a move you have chosen for them, and the position after their forced capture is one you had several turns to arrange. Giving a man away in order to take two back is the oldest idea in the game.

The board opens on the middle setting

Steady is the strength filled in when the page loads, and it means the opponent looks four half-moves ahead: its move, your answer, its answer to that, and your reply. Gentle looks two and Tough looks six. Nothing else changes between them – the same rules, the same board, the same refusal to let you decline a capture – so a setting is not a difficulty in the sense a puzzle has one. It is a horizon, and everything you can build past it is invisible while you are building it. That is set out properly on the page about the opponent, along with what this one thinks a king is worth. None of it is fetched while you play, either, so you can play draughts online from a bookmark on a train and the opponent still answers. If you would rather nothing was thinking at all, two-player draughts is this board with the machine taken out, and the rules themselves, including the crowning that stops a jump dead, are on the rules page.

What the buttons under the board do

New game puts the twenty-four men back where they started. Take back rewinds a whole round, your move and the answer to it, because those two arrive together from your side of the screen and undoing only half of them would leave you looking at a position you never saw. The three strength buttons can be pressed in the middle of a game, and the board carries on from wherever it stands rather than resetting – so a position that has become dull is one press away from being played out by a deeper opponent, and a position you are losing is one press away from being played out by a shallower one.

The pieces are drawn as two different shapes as well as two different tones, one filled disc and one ring, so the board still reads on a monochrome screen. A king carries a second ring inside it. Arrow keys walk from dark square to dark square if you would rather not tap, and each square announces its own coordinate and whatever is standing on it. That is the whole of the interface. A game of draughts online wants an opponent, a board, and a way to take a move back when the phone is passed to somebody who was not concentrating, and there is not a great deal else worth putting on the screen.