Printable Draughts Board

What actually has to be on the paper

Searches for checkers printable and draughts printable are usually after a grid, and the grid is the easy part. A usable board needs sixty-four squares in an eight-by-eight arrangement, thirty-two of them shaded in a strict alternation so that no two shaded squares share an edge, and enough contrast between the two to tell them apart at arm length once the toner has started to give up. Numbers, borders and decoration are all optional. Since every piece spends the whole game on the shaded squares, faint shading is the one thing that genuinely makes a board hard to play on.

Ruling one by hand

The arithmetic is the only part worth writing down. Whatever square size you choose, the board is eight of them across, and nothing else constrains you. Twenty-two millimetre squares give a board a hundred and seventy-six millimetres wide, which sits inside the printable width of an A4 sheet with about eight millimetres to spare on each side. Twenty-five millimetre squares give two hundred, which fits the paper but leaves almost nothing at the edges. On US Letter, an inch a square gives an eight-inch board inside an eight and a half inch sheet, which is a quarter of an inch each side: fine if you are ruling it yourself, tight for a printer. Mark all eight divisions along one edge and all eight down the other before you draw a single line, and the board comes out square.

Then shade. Shade the corner square nearest your left hand, then leave one and shade one all the way along the row. Start the next row with a blank instead, and carry on. If the shading steps diagonally as you go, it is right; if two shaded squares ever end up side by side, one row has started on the wrong foot.

Twenty-four pieces you already own

Twelve a side. Coins are the traditional substitute for good reasons: two denominations differ in size as well as colour, so the board reads at a glance, and they stack. Stacking is not a nicety, it is a rule of the game. A crowned man is physically two pieces, one sitting on the other, and that is how you know a king from a man for the rest of the game. Bottle caps, buttons, two colours of dried bean and squares of card all work as long as they stack. The one thing that fails is a set you cannot pile up, because then you are remembering which four pieces are kings, and nobody manages that past the third one.

Setting up, and the five rules for the back of the sheet

Twelve men each on the three rows nearest each player, on shaded squares only, which leaves the middle two rows empty and eight vacant dark squares between you. Then write these down. A man moves one square diagonally forwards. If you can capture you must, and a capturing piece that can jump again must keep jumping until it cannot, all as one turn. A man reaching the far row is crowned and the turn ends there, even in the middle of a jump. A king moves one square in any diagonal direction, forwards or back. A player with no legal move loses, even with pieces still on the board. That is the whole game, and it fits on the back of the board with room to spare. If the printer wins the argument after all, the board above plays the same rules with two people on one screen.