Checkers — called draughts almost everywhere outside North America — runs on one unforgiving rule: if you can capture, you have to. It takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to stop underestimating.
How to Play Checkers
Checkers is played on the 64 squares of a standard board, but only the 32 dark squares are ever used. Each player starts with 12 pieces set up on the dark squares of the three rows closest to them, facing off across an empty middle. Pieces move diagonally forward, one square at a time, onto an empty square.
Captures work by jumping: if an opponent's piece sits diagonally adjacent to yours with an empty square directly beyond it, you jump over and remove that piece from the board. Under standard rules, captures are mandatory — if a jump is available, you must take it, and if that jump lands you next to another capturable piece, you must keep jumping in the same turn (a "chain" or multi-jump).
When a piece reaches the farthest row from where it started, it's crowned into a king, marked by stacking a second piece on top. Kings can move and capture diagonally in any direction — forward and backward — which makes them far more dangerous than regular pieces. The game ends when one player has no legal move left, whether because every piece is captured or every piece is blocked. That player loses.
The History of Checkers
Checkers' clearest ancestor is Alquerque, a capture-and-jump game played on a 5x5 grid of intersecting lines with 12 pieces per side. Alquerque is documented in ancient Egypt as far back as roughly 1400 BCE, and it's referenced in classical writing linked to Plato and Homer — making it one of the oldest strategy games with a continuous paper trail. The pieces were flat, light and dark discs, and the win condition was identical in spirit to modern checkers: eliminate the opponent's ability to move.
From Egypt, Alquerque spread across the Mediterranean world through traders, soldiers, and scholars, eventually reaching medieval Europe. Around 1100 CE, players in France adapted Alquerque's rules onto the larger 8x8 chessboard, giving the pieces room to build chains of captures — the French called this new game "Fierges," later "jeu de dames," and it's generally regarded as the direct forerunner of the game played today. From there it picked up two parallel names on its way around the world: "draughts" in Britain and most of the rest of the globe, and "checkers" in the United States and Canada, where it became a fixture of home game nights and, later, competitive tournament play. Checkers sits alongside chess and backgammon as one of the oldest surviving board games and is part of our classic board game lineup here on RivalPit, right next to other abstract strategy games that reward pure tactical thinking over luck.
Why Play Checkers on RivalPit
- Free and no download. Checkers runs instantly in your browser.
- Real-time multiplayer. Challenge a friend with a link, or play a solid CPU opponent.
- Live chat and points. Talk trash mid-match, earn points by playing (never purchased).
- One of 100+ free games on RivalPit, with new games added every week.