The history of {game}

From Alquerque to the draughts board

Draughts did not appear from nowhere. Its ancestor is alquerque, a jumping game played on a five-by-five lattice of points that was old in Spain by the thirteenth century and is described in the compendium of games Alfonso X had compiled in 1283.

Somewhere around 1100, most likely in the south of France, someone moved that jumping game onto the chessboard, restricted it to squares of one colour, and gave each player twelve pieces. The board was borrowed, the rules were not. The result was called fierges, and later jeu de dames.

The rule that split the game in two

For a long time capturing was optional. If you missed a capture your opponent could remove the offending piece as a penalty, a practice called huffing, and the game carried on.

In the early eighteenth century French players made capturing compulsory instead. The new game was called jeu forcé, and it was different enough that both versions survived side by side for decades. Compulsory capture eventually won everywhere, and huffing faded into a historical curiosity, which is why it appears here only as an unrated option.

Why there are thirteen games and not one

Each region that took up draughts settled its own answers to the same handful of questions, and then built a competitive tradition on top of them. By the time anyone thought to standardise, the codes were too well established and too well loved to merge.

The ten-by-ten international game grew out of the French tradition and became the world game, governed since 1947 by the FMJD. The English-speaking world kept the eight-by-eight board with short kings and free choice of capture. Russia settled on flying kings without a majority rule. Italy fixed a strict priority order and forbade men to capture kings. Spain and Italy set the board the other way round from everyone else. The Ottoman world played a different game altogether on all sixty-four squares.

The habit of calling these variants is a little unfair to them. To a Turkish or Italian player, theirs is the game and the rest are the variants.

Solved, and still worth playing

In 2007 a team led by Jonathan Schaeffer announced that English draughts had been weakly solved: with perfect play from both sides, the game is a draw, a result reached after eighteen years of computation.

This mattered less to players than outsiders expected. Perfect play is not available to people, the three-move ballot keeps opening theory from deciding games, and the other codes, on bigger boards with flying kings, remain far out of reach. A solved game is not a finished one.