Perfect checkers from the start is a proven draw
Checkers—draughts in British English—are jumping-capture board games for two. American checkers on an 8×8 board was weakly solved in 2007 by Jonathan Schaeffer’s team: perfect play from the standard start draws. Dark pieces move first on dark squares only, and most rules make captures mandatory.
The game grew out of alquerque. Checkers refers to the chequered board, while draughts comes from a verb meaning to draw or move. Russian, Turkish and Armenian draughts also use 8×8 boards, international draughts, popular in many countries, uses 10×10, and Canadian checkers and the Malaysian and Singaporean game called dam use 12×12. Most languages that did not get the game from English call it something like dame or damas, meaning ladies, and kings are called ladies too; Greek dama also names the chess queen.
Players sit on opposite sides, one with dark pieces, usually black, and one with light, usually white or red. Pieces step one square diagonally into empty squares and begin by moving only forward. A player who skips a required capture may have a piece removed as a penalty, sometimes called a muffin, though some variants make capturing optional. Anyone left without a legal move, whether out of pieces or completely blocked, loses in almost every version.
A single man can chain several jumps in one turn, zigzagging across directions. Men jump only forward in American checkers and Spanish draughts but both ways in international and Russian play. Reaching the far row, the kings row, crowns a man with a second piece on top; in American checkers a king simply gains the right to move and capture backward.
International draughts adds flying kings that slide any distance and can capture a man far away by landing beyond it. Since jumped pieces stay on the board until the turn ends, a flying king can be blocked mid-sequence by a piece it has already jumped. Many people now play on free phone apps.
Source: Checkers
