The history of {game}

The Libro de los juegos

Alquerque appears in the great compendium of games compiled for Alfonso X of Castile in 1283, alongside chess and backgammon. The manuscript shows the board and the pieces clearly. What it does not do is set out the rules in the detail a modern player needs.

The name comes to Spanish from the Arabic al-qirq, and the game reached Iberia through the Islamic world. Boards of the same pattern have been found scratched into stone across the Mediterranean and the Near East, some of them very much older.

The move to the chessboard

Around the twelfth century, most likely in the south of France, alquerque's rules were transplanted onto a chessboard with the pieces confined to squares of one colour. Twelve pieces a side survived the move, as did the short jump and eventually the compulsory capture. Promotion at the far end was added, and draughts existed.

This is the clearest line of descent anywhere in this family, and it is why alquerque is on this site at all: it is not a curiosity, it is the parent.

What we are actually playing

Since the medieval sources do not settle every rule, the version played here is a reconstruction from Murray and Bell, and the choices are recorded in the game's configuration file. Where a rule could reasonably go either way, we have offered both as variants rather than picking one and pretending it is the original.