Checkers

Lore & Background

The Ancient Greeks and Romans played capture games (Petteia and Latrunculi) with some similarity to checkers. A more likely ancestor is alquerque, played on a 5×5 grid with intersecting lines. The 10th-century Arab scholar Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani mentioned a game called Quirkat in his Kitab al-Aghani, though without rules. Whether forced captures or promotion existed in alquerque is debated, as the manuscript does not clearly document these rules. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, draughts developed as an alquerque game that migrated to chess boards, leading to a split in European development.

Reader's Guide

Checkers holds significance as a widely played strategy game with a long history, though its exact origins are disputed. The game's development from alquerque, documented in the 13th-century Libro de los Juegos, marks a key transition to the modern form. The 2007 weak solution of American checkers by Jonathan Schaeffer's team demonstrated that perfect play leads to a draw, a milestone in computational game analysis. The game's rules vary across cultures, with different board sizes (8×8, 10×10, 12×12) and piece movement rules, such as flying kings in international draughts versus simpler kings in American checkers. The mandatory capture rule, fundamental in most official variants, distinguishes checkers from many other board games. The game's legacy includes its presence in online play via apps, and its terminology influences other languages, where checkers is often called 'dame' or similar terms referring to ladies.

Did You Know?

• American checkers was weakly solved in 2007 by a team of Canadian computer scientists led by Jonathan Schaeffer, showing perfect play results in a draw.
• The term 'draughts' derives from the verb 'to draw' or 'to move', while 'checkers' comes from the checkered board.
• In international draughts, kings can move any number of squares forward or backward and are called flying kings.