Draughts
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| Draughts | |
|---|---|
| starting position on a 10×10 draughts board. | |
| Players | 2 |
| Age range | Recommended 5 years and up. |
| Setup time | 10-60 seconds |
| Playing time | |
| Random chance | None |
| Skills required | Tactics, Strategy |
Draughts (IPA: /dɹɑːfʦ/) (British English) or checkers[1] (American English) is a group of abstract strategy board games between two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over the enemy's pieces.
The most popular forms are international draughts, played on a 10×10 board, followed by English draughts, also called American checkers that is played on an 8×8 board, but there are many other variants. Draughts developed from alquerque.[2]
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[edit] General rules
Draughts is played by two people, on opposite sides of a playing board, alternating moves. One player has dark pieces, and the other has light pieces. The player with the dark pieces makes the first move unless stated otherwise. Pieces move diagonally and pieces of the opponent are captured by jumping over them. The playable surface consists only of the dark squares. A piece may only move into an unoccupied square. Capturing is mandatory in most official rules, however, many people still play with variant rules that allow capturing to be optional. A piece that is captured is removed from the board. In all variants, the player who has no pieces left or cannot move anymore has lost the game unless otherwise stated.
Uncrowned pieces ("men") move one step diagonally forwards and capture other pieces by making two steps in the same direction, jumping over the opponent's piece on the intermediate square. Multiple opposing pieces may be captured in a single turn provided this is done by successive jumps made by a single piece; these jumps do not need to be in the same direction but may zigzag. In English draughts men can only capture forwards, but in international draughts they may also capture (diagonally) backwards.
When men reach the crownhead or kings row (the farthest row forward), they become kings, marked by placing an additional piece on top of the first, and acquire additional powers including the ability to move backwards (and capture backwards, in variants in which they cannot already do so).[3]
In international draughts, kings can move as far as they want in diagonals like a bishop in chess. However, they cannot capture like a bishop, but jump over the captured piece, moving over as many empty fields as the player wants but jumping over only a single, opposing piece in each jump. (As with men, a king may make successive jumps in a single turn provided that each is a capture.) This rule, known as flying kings, is not used in English draughts, in which a king's only advantage over a man is the ability to move and capture backwards as well as forwards. Notice that captured pieces are removed from the board only after capturing is finished. Thus sometimes the captured but not yet removed piece obliges a king to stop after capturing at a given field where he in turn will be captured by the adversary.
[edit] Variants
[edit] National and regional standard rules
| National variant | Board size | Pieces per side | Flying kings? | Can men capture backwards? | Who moves first? | Capture constraints | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| International draughts (or Polish draughts) | 10×10 | 20 | yes | yes | White | A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces. | Pieces only promote when they land on the final rank, not when they pass through it. It is mainly played in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, some eastern European countries, some parts of Africa, some parts of the former USSR, and other European countries |
| English draughts | 8×8 | 12 | no | no | Black | Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made. | Also called American checkers or "straight checkers", since it is also played in the USA. |
| Brazilian checkers | 8×8 | 8 | yes | yes | White | A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces. | Played in Brazil. |
| Canadian checkers | 12×12 | 30 | yes | yes | White | Mainly played in Canada. | |
| Pool checkers | 8×8 | 12 | yes | yes | Black | Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made. | It is mainly played in the southeastern United States. In many games at the end one adversary has three kings while the other one has just one king. In such a case the first adversary must win in thirteen moves or the game is declared a draw. |
| Spanish checkers | 10×10 | 20 | yes | no | White | A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces, and the maximum possible number of kings from all such sequences. | Also called Spanish pool checkers. The board is mirrored (the left side is flipped to the right side and vice versa). It is mainly played in some parts in South America and some Northern African countries. |
| Russian checkers | 8×8 | 12 | yes | yes | White | Any sequence may be chosen, as long as all possible captures are made. | Also called shashki or Russian shashki checkers. If a man touches the kings row from a jump and it can continue to jump backwards, it jumps backwards as a king, not as a man. It is mainly played in some parts in Russia, some parts of the former USSR, and Israel. In many games at the end one adversary has three kings while the other one has just one king. In such a case the first adversary normally wins if (s)he occupies the main diagonal first and then builds the so-called Petrov's triangle. |
| Italian checkers | no | White | If there are many sequences to capture, one has to capture the sequence that has the most pieces. If there are still more sequences, one has to capture with a king instead of a man. If there are still more sequences, one has to capture the sequence that has the most kings. If there are still more sequences, one has to capture the sequence that has a king first. | Men cannot jump kings. The board is mirrored (the left side is flipped to the right side and vice versa). It is mainly played in Italy, and some Northern African countries. | |||
| Turkish draughts | 8×8 | 16 | yes | White | A sequence must capture the maximum possible number of pieces. | In this form of the game (also known as Dama), men move straight forward or sideways, instead of diagonally. When a man reaches the last row it promotes to a flying king (Dama) which moves like a rook. The pieces are placed on the second and third rows. It is played in Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and several other locations of the Middle-East, as well as the same locations as Russian checkers. |
[edit] Invented variants
- Suicide checkers - Also called anti-checkers, giveaway checkers or losing draughts. This is the misère version of checkers. The winner is the first player to have no legal move: that is, all of whose pieces are lost or blocked.
- Lasca is a checkers variant on a 7×7 board, with 25 fields used. Jumped pieces are placed under the jumper, so that towers are built. Only the top piece of a jumped tower is captured. This variant was invented by Emanuel Lasker, former World Chess Champion.
- Cheskers is a variant of checkers invented by Solomon Golomb. Each player begins with a bishop and a "knight" (which jump with coordinates (3,1) rather than (2,1) so as to stay on the black squares), and men reaching the back rank promote to a bishop, knight, or king.
- Tiers is a complex variant of checkers that allows players to upgrade their pieces beyond kings.
- DaMath is a checkers variant utilizing math principles and numbered chips popular in the Philippines.
- Standoff is an American checkers variant using both checkers and dice.
[edit] Games sometimes confused with checkers variants
- Halma is a game in which pieces can move in any direction and jump over any other piece, friend or enemy. Pieces are not captured. Each player starts with 19 (two-player) or 13 (four-player) pieces all in one corner and tries to move them all into the opposite corner. Halma is actually very different from checkers.
- Chinese checkers is based on Halma, but uses a star-shaped board divided into equilateral triangles. Despite its name, this game is not of Chinese origin, nor is it based on checkers.
[edit] History
The game has been played in Europe since the 16th century, and a similar game was certainly known to the ancients. In the British Museum are specimens of ancient Egyptian checkerboards.
In Portuguese and Spanish, checkers is called damas, which is a term that also refers to women.
[edit] Computer draughts
In July 2007, Science magazine published the news that computer scientists from the University of Alberta had weakly solved the game of (8×8) draughts. [4] After 18 years of research, their program Chinook has been able to demonstrate its capability to always enter into a known, precomputed result. From any of the 300 possible tournament openings, the forward solving search mechanisms (the Proof Tree) can direct all subsequent play into one of the 39 trillion endgames that have been determined to be either won, lost, or drawn positions. The total number of positions appearing in the full proof tree is 500,995,484,682,338,672,639. [5] As jumps are compulsory, and pieces are forced to come off of the board, the endgame databases cannot be avoided. The conclusion is that proper play by both players in a game will always lead to a draw. Chinook is now an invincible program, although it actually surpassed the ability of the best human players in 1996. [6] It should be noted that in 1995, former World Champion Don Lafferty played a 32 game match Chinook that ended in a 1-1 tie with 30 draws.
Alan Millhone, President of the American Checker Federation, commented on this news "I don't think a human would have a chance against a computer now." [5] American checkers is the most complex game to be solved to date.
In the period of 1952–1962 Arthur Samuel (IBM) wrote the first draughts game-playing program. While not able to consistently beat the best humans, it did defeat the fourth best player in the world in an exhibition game. Nevertheless, it is a milestone in AI programming. Among other things, it was the first game-playing program to use bitboards, long before they were popular in chess programming.
The last computer world championship was played in Las Vegas, 2002, and was won by Nemesis. Chinook did not compete. No further computer championships have been played since then, and are unlikely to be in future, as the complete solution to the game by Chinook in 2007 makes such games redundant now.
Portable Draughts Notation is the standard format to store draughts games.
[edit] Great players of the game
- Marion Tinsley