A race across the board where the long jump chains win it, leap your pieces over any others to land your whole camp in enemy territory first.
Each side has a camp of ten pieces in one corner. The goal is to be first to move every one of your pieces into the opposite corner, your opponent's camp. A piece may step to an adjacent empty square, or jump over any single neighboring piece (yours or theirs) into the empty square beyond.
Jumps can chain: from a landing square you may jump again, hopping clear across the board in a single turn. There are no captures, pieces you jump stay put.
Halma takes its name from the Greek ἅλμα, "leap", and was invented in 1883 or 1884 by George Howard Monks — an American thoracic surgeon at Harvard Medical School, which is not the usual background for a board game designer.
He did not start from nothing. His model was an English game called Hoppity, devised in 1854, which he rebuilt on a checkered 16×16 board for two or four players.
The mechanism he settled on has outlived the game itself. Pieces step one square or jump over any adjacent piece, friend or enemy, with chains of jumps allowed and nothing ever captured — a movement system that every descendant, including Chinese checkers, has kept essentially unchanged.
Halma is a classic 19th-century board game of jumping and movement, the ancestor of many corner-to-corner race games. This is an original, free browser version with computer, two-player, and online play, ready instantly with no download or sign-up.