Oyun
Alquerque
The mediaeval ancestor drawn in Alfonso X's book of games — the board every European draughts code grew out of.
{variant} — the rules
Alquerque de doce
Twelve pieces a side on a lined 5×5 board: steps forwards and sideways, and every jump that is offered must be taken.
Backward moves
The same game with the restriction lifted — pieces step and jump in every direction from the first move.
Promotion
A piece that reaches the far row earns the right to move backwards, the seed of the draughts king.
Huffing (historic)Unrated
The mediaeval penalty restored: miss a capture and your opponent may take the guilty piece off the board.
In one sentence
Alquerque is the game draughts came from. Twelve pieces a side on a five-by-five lattice, one empty point in the middle, and captures by short jumps along the lines.
There are no kings and no promotion in the standard game, which sounds like a limitation and is really the point: with nothing to aim for at the far end, the whole game is about the lattice itself and about who runs out of safe moves first.
Its rules were not fully written down at the time, so what we play is a reconstruction. We follow the version reconstructed from the medieval sources by Murray and Bell, and say so plainly rather than presenting it as certain.