Checkers

How to play Checkers

1. Tap one of your pieces, then tap a highlighted square. Pieces slide one square diagonally forward; red moves first, and who plays red swaps every round.
2. Capture by jumping: leap over an enemy piece into the empty square beyond, and it's off the board. One jump can chain into two or three in a single glorious turn — tap the final landing square and the whole sweep plays out.
3. Under official rules, jumps are mandatory — if you can take, you must. Prefer the loose living-room version? Every mode has a house-rule toggle.
4. March a piece to the far row and it's crowned a king: it moves and jumps backwards too. Keeping your own back row at home delays your opponent's kings.
5. Win by capturing everything, or by leaving your opponent with no move at all. Forty moves with nothing captured and no man advanced is a draw — shake hands.

A little background

Checkers — draughts, if you learned it on the other side of the Atlantic — is one of the oldest board games still on kitchen tables: its ancestor alquerque is thousands of years old, and the modern game was born in medieval France when someone moved the pieces onto a chessboard. The forced-capture rule arrived in the 16th century and has started arguments ever since, which is exactly why it's a toggle here. Computers finally weakly solved the game in 2007 — perfect play by both sides is a draw — but no one at the dinner table plays perfectly.

Play it the rainy-afternoon way — one phone flat on the table like a fold-out board — or take on the computer: Easy plays like a distracted little sibling, Medium falls for a well-laid trap, and Hard reads eight moves ahead. And when someone claims the title from the next room, start a duel: two devices, one live board, every clack on both screens. Free, no ads, no account — everything but the duel works offline.