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Afro Draughts

The family

Alquerque, draughts, fanorona and surakarta are not one lineage but several that touch. This is what the evidence supports, and where it stops.

Lineage

  1. Alquerque before 1283

    A jumping game on a five-by-five lattice, described in the compendium of games compiled for Alfonso X in 1283 and older than that text. The direct ancestor of draughts.

  2. Draughts c. 1100 onwards

    Descended from: alquerque

    Alquerque's jumping rules moved onto the chessboard, restricted to squares of one colour. Everything else on this branch is a local answer to the same few questions.

  3. The national codes 1700s onwards

    Descended from: draughts

    Compulsory capture split the game in the early eighteenth century, and each region settled its own rules on flying kings, backward captures and the majority rule.

  4. Fanorona by the 1600s

    Madagascar's national game, played on the same lattice as alquerque but capturing by approach and withdrawal rather than by jumping. A cousin by board, not by rules.

  5. Surakarta documented 20th century

    From Java. Pieces capture by travelling around looping tracks through the corner arcs. Related to nothing else here except in spirit.

Timeline

One idea, four answers

All four games ask what should happen when your piece meets an enemy piece, and each gives a different answer.

Alquerque and draughts say: jump over it and it is gone. Fanorona says: move towards it, or directly away from it, and the whole line of pieces behind it falls. Surakarta says: nothing happens when you meet a piece by walking. To capture you must send a piece all the way round a loop, through at least one of the arcs at the corners, and take the first enemy it arrives at.

The surakarta answer is the strangest and the most beautiful. The arcs are not decoration; they are the only way a capture can happen at all, which is why the board is drawn the way it is.

The lattice

Alquerque and fanorona share a board pattern that turns up all over the world: a grid of points with lines joining neighbours orthogonally, and diagonals through every second point. It gives some points eight neighbours and others only four, and that unevenness is what makes the games tactical.

Draughts abandoned the lattice for the chessboard and lost the orthogonal lines in the process, which is why draughts happens entirely on diagonals. Frisian draughts is the interesting exception: it put the orthogonal captures back, and the result is by common consent the hardest code in the family.

A note on names

We use each game's own name and each code's own name. Draughts and checkers are the same game under two names, so both domains lead here. Dama, shashki and damas are not translations of each other but genuinely different codes, and we have not merged them.

Where a game is a modern reconstruction of rules that were not fully recorded, we say so on its pages and mark it in the registry rather than presenting a guess as the historical article.

Works consulted

Cited, never copied. Where accounts disagree we say so rather than choosing the tidier story.

  • H. J. R. Murray, A History of Board-Games Other Than Chess (1952).
  • R. C. Bell, Board and Table Games from Many Civilizations (1960, revised 1979).
  • The Libro de los juegos compiled for Alfonso X of Castile, 1283, for alquerque.
  • Fédération Mondiale du Jeu de Dames rules of play, for the international code.