The timeless game of diagonal moves and double-jumps. Take on a computer opponent at three skill levels, play pass-and-play with a friend on one device, or face a real person online.
Checkers (also called draughts) is played on an 8×8 board. Each side starts with 12 pieces on the dark squares. The goal is to capture all of your opponent's pieces, or leave them with no legal move.
Pieces move one square diagonally forward to an empty dark square. You capture by jumping diagonally over an adjacent enemy piece into the empty square beyond it, and if another jump is available from the new square, you keep jumping in the same turn.
The ancestry of draughts is genuinely uncertain, and the confident version — a straight line back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia — does not survive examination.
Boards found at Ur date to roughly 3000 BCE, but the Game of Ur used seven markers a side and three tetrahedral dice: it is a race game, closer to backgammon than to anything played here. Calling those checkers boards stretches the evidence past where it can go, and the Egyptian claims have the same problem.
What defines draughts is not the board but the move — the diagonal step and the compulsory jumping capture, with chains of jumps in one turn. That mechanism appears far later than the boards people point at, which is why the honest answer about its origin remains that nobody knows.
Checkers descends from games played for thousands of years; the modern 8×8 version spread across Europe and the Americas as draughts. It is simple to learn yet genuinely deep, strong players calculate long forced sequences of jumps. This is an original, ad-supported browser version you can play instantly, with no download or sign-up.