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Draughts, in every name it goes by
Thirteen national codes of draughts, plus Fanorona from Madagascar, Alquerque from mediaeval Iberia and Surakarta from Java. One board, one account, one rating for each code.
Choose your game
Four games, twenty-two variants. Each keeps its own rules, its own board and its own rating pool.
Draughts
One game, thirteen national codes — from the 10×10 international board to Turkish dama on all sixty-four squares.
Fanorona
Madagascar's national game, where a piece captures by moving towards a line of enemies — or away from it.
Alquerque
The mediaeval ancestor drawn in Alfonso X's book of games — the board every European draughts code grew out of.
Surakarta
From Java, the only game in the family where a piece captures by travelling around a loop rather than over an enemy.
Why play here
Every game on this site is a jumping game. Pieces are alike, nobody has a queen or a general, and the whole contest is about lines of movement and what happens when two pieces meet on one.
They are not all descended from each other. Draughts genuinely comes from alquerque, and can be traced. Fanorona and surakarta arrived at capture by their own routes, in Madagascar and Java, and their captures work nothing like a jump. They are cousins by resemblance rather than by descent, and that is the honest way to describe them.