This is American checkers, the game the British call draughts: an 8 × 8 board, play on the dark squares only, twelve pieces a side, and short diagonal moves. The rule that shapes everything is that captures are compulsory. A large part of good checkers is using that rule to make your opponent jump where you want them to. You can play against the computer at three levels, or switch to Friend and pass the device back and forth.
How to play
Red sits at the bottom and moves first; black starts at the top. Each side’s twelve pieces fill the dark squares of its first three rows.
Ordinary moves. A plain piece steps one square diagonally forward onto an empty dark square. It never moves backwards.
Jumping. If an enemy piece is diagonally adjacent and the square directly beyond it is empty, you can jump over it and remove it. Plain pieces only jump forward.
- You must jump if you can. When a capture is available anywhere on the board, the game does not offer quiet moves.
- You choose which jump. If several captures are possible, any one of them is legal; it does not have to be the longest.
- A jump continues. If the piece that just landed can jump again, it keeps going in the same turn, and it must finish the chain.
Kings. A piece that reaches the far row is crowned and gets a crown on it. Its turn ends on crowning, even if a king could jump on from there. From the next turn a king moves and jumps diagonally in all four directions, but still only one square at a time (this is not the long-range king of Turkish Draughts or international draughts).
End of the game. You win by capturing every enemy piece or leaving your opponent with no legal move. If 40 moves go by on each side without a capture and without a plain piece moving, the game is drawn.
Controls. Tap a piece to light up its legal destinations, then tap one. For a multi-jump, tap the landing squares one after another. At the top, choose Computer or Friend, set Easy, Medium or Hard, and use Hint or Undo when you need them. Against the computer, Undo takes back your move and its reply together. The status line also counts how many red and black pieces are left on the board.
Strategy
Hold your back row as long as you can. Your opponent needs empty squares on your first row to crown. Many players keep two back-row pieces (on the squares a king would land on most often) home until late in the game.
Play toward the centre. A piece on the edge only has one forward square. Central pieces have two and can support each other.
Travel in pairs. A piece with a friendly piece diagonally behind it cannot be jumped from the front on that diagonal. Advancing in a loose chain is much safer than sending single pieces forward.
Use the forced jump. Since captures are compulsory, you can offer one piece to drag an enemy piece onto a square where you take back two. Before every move, check which jumps you would be forcing on your opponent, and which ones they could force on you.
Count tempo in the endgame. With few pieces left, the side that crowns first usually wins. A king is worth far more than a plain piece because it can go back to hunt stragglers.
Two kings beat one. If you are ahead, trade pieces: every even exchange makes your advantage larger in proportion.
Difficulty levels
The computer searches ahead with a minimax search. Easy looks one move ahead, Medium three, and Hard six (with a node budget so it answers quickly). In a 20-game test, Hard beat Medium in 17 games with 2 draws, and Medium beat Easy in all 20. Hard is a reasonable club-level opponent for casual players, but it is not a perfect solver.
