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Checkers[note 1] (American English), also known as draughts (/drɑːfts, drfts/; British English), is a group of strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over opponent pieces. Checkers is developed from alquerque.[1] The term "checkers" derives from the checkered board which the game is played on, whereas "draughts" derives from the verb "to draw" or "to move".[2]
Checkers is played by two opponents on opposite sides of the game board. One player has dark pieces (usually black); the other has light pieces (usually white or red). The darker color moves first, then players alternate turns. A player cannot move the opponent's pieces. A move consists of moving a piece forward to an adjacent unoccupied square. If the adjacent square contains an opponent's piece, and the square immediately beyond it is vacant, the piece may be captured (and removed from the game) by jumping over it.
Only the dark squares of the checkerboard are used. A piece can only move forward into an unoccupied square. When capturing an opponent's piece is possible, capturing is mandatory in most official rules. If the player does not capture, the other player can remove the opponent's piece as a penalty (or muffin), and where there are two or more such positions the player forfeits pieces that cannot be moved (although some rule variations make capturing optional).[3] In almost all variants, a player with no valid move remaining loses. This occurs if the player has no pieces left, or if all the player's pieces are obstructed from moving by opponent pieces.
An uncrowned piece (man) moves one step ahead and captures an adjacent opponent's piece by jumping over it and landing on the next square. Multiple enemy pieces can be captured in a single turn provided this is done by successive jumps made by a single piece; the jumps do not need to be in the same line and may "zigzag" (change diagonal direction). In American checkers, men can jump only forwards; in international draughts and Russian draughts, men can jump both forwards and backwards.
When a man reaches the farthest row forward, known as the kings row or crown head, it becomes a king. It is marked by placing an additional piece on top of, or crowning, the first man. The king has additional powers, namely the ability to move any amount of squares at a time (in international checkers), move backwards and, in variants where men cannot already do so, capture backwards. Like a man, a king can make successive jumps in a single turn, provided that each jump captures an enemy piece.
In international draughts, kings (also called flying kings) move any distance. They may capture an opposing man any distance away by jumping to any of the unoccupied squares immediately beyond it. Because jumped pieces remain on the board until the turn is complete, it is possible to reach a position in a multi-jump move where the flying king is blocked from capturing further by a piece already jumped.
An Arabic game called Quirkat or al-qirq, with similar play to modern checkers, was played on a 55 board. It is mentioned in the tenth-century work Kitab al-Aghani.[4] Al qirq was also the name for the game that is now called nine men's morris.[9] Al qirq was brought to Spain by the Moors,[10] where it became known as Alquerque, the Spanish derivation of the Arabic name. It was maybe adapted into a derivation of latrunculi, or the game of the Little Soldiers, with a leaping capture, which, like modern Argentine, German, Greek and Thai draguhts, had flying kings which had to stop on the next square after the captured piece, but pieces could only make up to three captures at once, or seven if all directions were legal. That said, even if playing al qirq inside the cells of a square grid was not already known to the Moors who brought it, which it probably was, either via playing on a chessboard (in about 1100, probably in the south of France, this was done once again using backgammon pieces,[11] thereby each piece was called a "fers", the same name as the chess queen, as the move of the two pieces was the same at the time)[12] or adapting Seega using jumping capture. The rules are given in the 13th-century book Libro de los juegos.[4]
The rule of crowning was used by the 13th century, as it is mentioned in the Philippe Mousks's Chronique in 1243[4] when the game was known as Fierges, the name used for the chess queen (derived from the Persian ferz, meaning royal counsellor or vizier). The pieces became known as "dames" when that name was also adopted for the chess queen.[12] The rule forcing players to take whenever possible was introduced in France in around 1535, at which point the game became known as Jeu forc, identical to modern American checkers.[4][13] The game without forced capture became known as Le jeu plaisant de dames, the precursor of international checkers.
American checkers (English draughts) has been the arena for several notable advances in game artificial intelligence. In 1951 Christopher Strachey wrote the first video game program on checkers. The checkers program tried to run for the first time on 30 July 1951 at NPL, but was unsuccessful due to program errors. In the summer of 1952 he successfully ran the program on Ferranti Mark 1 computer and played the first computer checkers and arguably the first video game ever according to certain definitions. In the 1950s, Arthur Samuel created one of the first board game-playing programs of any kind. More recently, in 2007 scientists at the University of Alberta[24] developed their "Chinook" program to the point where it is unbeatable. A brute force approach that took hundreds of computers working nearly two decades was used to solve the game,[25] showing that a game of checkers will always end in a draw if neither player makes a mistake.[26][27] The solution is for the checkers variation called go-as-you-please (GAYP) checkers and not for the variation called three-move restriction checkers, however it is a legal three-move restriction game because only openings believed to lose are barred under the three-move restriction. As of December 2007, this makes American checkers the most complex game ever solved.
In November 1983, the Science Museum Oklahoma (then called the Omniplex) unveiled a new exhibit: Lefty the Checker Playing Robot. Programmed by Scott M Savage, Lefty used an Armdroid robotic arm by Colne Robotics and was powered by a 6502 processor with a combination of Basic and Assembly code to interactively play a round of checkers with visitors to the museum. Originally, the program was deliberately simple so that the average museum visitor could potentially win, but over time was improved. The improvements however proved to be more frustrating for the visitors, so the original code was reimplemented.[28]
It is PSPACE-hard to determine whether a specified player has a winning strategy. And if a polynomial bound is placed on the number of moves that are allowed in between jumps (which is a reasonable generalisation of the drawing rule in standard Checkers), then the problem is in PSPACE, thus it is PSPACE-complete.[29] However, without this bound, Checkers is EXPTIME-complete.[30]
Column draughts (Russian towers), also known as Bashni, is a kind of draughts, known in Russia since the beginning of the nineteenth century, in which the game is played according to the usual rules of Russian draughts, but with the difference that the captured man is not removed from the playing field: rather, it is placed under the capturing piece (man or tower).
The resulting towers move around the board as a whole, "obeying" the upper piece. When taking a tower, only the uppermost piece is removed from it: and the resulting tower belongs to one player or the other according to the color of its new uppermost piece.
It is played in Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Greece, and several other locations in the Middle East, as well as in the same locations as Russian checkers. There are several variants in these countries, with the Armenian variant (called tama) allowing also forward-diagonal movement of men and the Greek requiring the king to stop directly after the captured piece. With this rule, there is no draw with one king and men versus one king.
The Conservancy offers its Chess Lecture & Simul Series at Chess & Checkers House for anyone looking to develop their skills. The series features guidance and techniques from world-renowned chess experts. Chess and checkers game pieces are also available to the public to borrow, free of charge.
Dive into the vibrant world of chess with International Chess Master and native New Yorker, Kassa Korley! In this interview, Kassa shares insights on how chess serves as a powerful force for connection, dispels common misconceptions about the game, and discusses the significance of playing in public spaces.
Central Park's iconic Chess & Checkers House and Kinderberg are newly restored. See how the Conservancy's expert team of landscape architects, architects, project managers, and historians worked to revive the site, a destination for kids of all ages for over 150 years.
In contrast, the authors write, historians and students read vertically, meaning they would stay within the original website in question to evaluate its reliability. These readers were often taken in by unreliable indicators such as a professional-looking name and logo, an array of scholarly references or a nonprofit URL.
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