Ancient Origins
Checkers is one of the oldest board games still played in recognizable form. Its most direct ancestor, a game called Alquerque, was played in ancient Egypt as far back as 1400 BCE — game boards have been found carved into the stone of the temple at Kurna. Alquerque used a five-by-five grid and pieces that moved and captured in multiple directions, and it spread through the ancient world via Mesopotamia and Persia into the Islamic world, where it remained popular for centuries.
The game reached medieval Europe through the Moorish occupation of Spain, and it was in 12th century France that the crucial modifications were made that produced modern Checkers. A French player adapted Alquerque to be played on a standard chess board — the 8×8 grid — expanded the number of pieces, and restricted movement to diagonal squares only. This version, known in France as Fierges or later Jeu de dames (the Ladies' Game), spread across Europe and eventually became the standard form of the game.
The rule requiring players to capture whenever possible — the forced capture rule — was added around 1535, transforming the game from a casual diversion into a game of genuine tactical complexity. This single rule change is largely responsible for the depth that makes Checkers worth studying seriously even today.
In 2007, a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta announced that they had "solved" Checkers — meaning they had computed the perfect play from every possible position. The result: with perfect play from both sides, every game of Checkers ends in a draw. The program, named Chinook, had taken nearly two decades to complete the computation.
Checkers and Chess: The Great Divide
Checkers and Chess developed alongside each other in medieval Europe, sharing a board and some cultural space, but diverging radically in character. Chess became associated with the nobility and military strategy — each piece had a rank, a role, and a value hierarchy. Checkers was more democratic: all pieces were equal, there were no ranks, and the game's depth came entirely from position and timing rather than from the special powers of individual pieces.
This democratic quality made Checkers accessible to everyone. It required no expensive set of carved figures, just any flat objects of two colors. It could be played on scratched markings in dirt, on a cloth, on a board drawn in chalk. For working-class communities across Europe and America, Checkers was the board game. Chess was for the educated; Checkers was for everyone else — and everyone else turned out to be much better at it than the educated gave them credit for.
"Checkers has only two types of pieces and four types of moves. That it produces games of genuine complexity is one of the most elegant facts in all of game design."
The American Game
Checkers arrived in America with European settlers and took firm root in American culture. By the 19th century it was one of the most widely played games in the country, with a particularly strong tradition in rural communities where it was played on porches and in general stores. The American Checker Federation was founded in 1948 and organized competitive play at local, regional, and national levels.
American Checkers — also called English Draughts — uses the 8×8 board with 12 pieces per side, moving on dark squares only, and the forced capture rule. This is the version most North Americans know. It differs from international variants primarily in that pieces can only move and capture forward until crowned King, at which point they can move in any diagonal direction.
The game produced dedicated masters who studied it with the same rigor applied to Chess. Marion Tinsley, widely considered the greatest Checkers player in history, was virtually undefeated for decades and finally met a worthy opponent in Chinook — the computer program that would eventually solve the game. Tinsley retired from his match against Chinook in 1994 due to illness and died shortly after. He had lost only seven games in his entire career spanning 45 years.
Chinook and the Solved Game
The story of Chinook is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of artificial intelligence and games. Developed by Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta beginning in 1989, Chinook used a combination of search algorithms and an endgame database to play Checkers at a superhuman level. It became the first computer program to win a world championship in any game when it claimed the World Checkers title in 1994.
The complete "solving" of Checkers in 2007 — proving that perfect play results in a draw — raised philosophical questions about the value of playing a solved game. The answer, most players concluded, was that knowing the theoretical outcome of a game played between two perfect players has almost no impact on the experience of playing against another imperfect human. Knowing Chess is theoretically a draw (as most grandmasters believe) doesn't make the game less interesting to play. The depth exists at human level; the solution exists at a level no human can reach.
Checkers Worldwide
While American/English Checkers is the most familiar version in the English-speaking world, several major variants are played internationally. International Draughts, played on a 10×10 board with 20 pieces per side, is the standard in the Netherlands, Russia, and much of continental Europe and Africa. It is considered a significantly deeper game than the 8×8 version — the larger board and additional pieces create far more combinatorial complexity.
Russian Draughts adds the rule that Kings can move any number of squares diagonally (like a Bishop in Chess) rather than just one square at a time. This makes Kings dramatically more powerful and changes the endgame character of the game considerably. Turkish Draughts plays on an 8×8 board but allows pieces to move orthogonally (forward, left, right) as well as diagonally, producing a very different tactical environment.