Checkers

The game of checkers or draughts is about a thousand years old. It hails from southern France, from the Langue d'Oc, the most advanced civilization in Western Europe at the time, till it was destroyed in the Albigensian Crusades 200 years later. It is, in a way, a combination of some of the rules of the older game Alquerque and the already well-known and widespread chess board.

In most languages (English is a notable exception), the game has a name derived from the queen in chess: dames, dame, damas, dammen, for the core idea is that a stone that reaches the opposite end of the board is converted into the equivalent of a queen in chess. Back when checkers was concieved, the queen was a very weak piece, still called fers (vizier). It could only move one square diagonally. In the English-speaking world, crowned pieces (kings) in checkers still move this way. In the rest of the world, they can move any distance, though only diagonally.

Another important local rule variation is the size of the board. In the English-speaking world and in Germany (where it was never very popular) it is played on a standard chess board. In most of the rest of the world it is played on a 10×10 board. This variant is also known as international checkers. It is especially popular in the Netherlands and Russia, where it is taken as serious as Othello in Japan.

Checkers and Computers

In 1952, A. L. Samuel of IBM wrote a checkers program on an IBM 701. It was nearly the first game program ever. NIMROD, a more ambitious but less well-known project, is older. Since Nim is not a board game, it can still be said that the relation of computers with checkers is older than with any other board game.

But this seniority did not, it seems, translate into a higher number of games. There are more chess programs than checker programs. One of the few programmers who took checkers really serious seems to have been Adrian Millett, who tried to introduce the international variant to the USA and UK with Dynamo.

Checkers for DOS
Chekkers	Argo Checkers	Blitz	Dynamo
Checkers for Windows
Checkers	Daniel's Checkers	Draughts