Партія
Draughts
One game, thirteen national codes — from the 10×10 international board to Turkish dama on all sixty-four squares.
{variant} — the rules
International draughts
The tournament code: a 10×10 board, twenty men a side, flying kings and the majority-capture rule.
English draughts / American checkers
The 8×8 game most of the English-speaking world learned first — short kings, forward-only men, and a free choice among captures.
Russian draughts (Shashki)
8×8 with flying kings, no majority rule, and a man that crowns in the middle of a jump and keeps flying.
Pool checkers
The Southern American code: Russian in spirit, except a man crossing the crown row mid-jump finishes the sequence as a man.
Brazilian draughts
International rules squeezed onto the 8×8 board — flying kings and majority capture without the long diagonals.
Italian draughts
A mirrored board where a man may never take a king, kings are short, and capture priority is judged strictly.
Spanish draughts (Damas)
Mirrored board, flying kings, men that capture only forwards, and majority counted first in pieces and then in kings.
Turkish draughts (Dama)
Played on every square, not just the dark ones: men move and take orthogonally, and kings sweep whole ranks and files.
Armenian draughts (Tama)
Turkish dama with one addition — a man may also step diagonally forwards, which changes every opening you know.
Greek draughts (Dama)
The Aegean cousin of Turkish dama, played without the majority rule, so any capture will do.
Frisian draughtsBeta
The heaviest code in the family: captures run orthogonally as well as diagonally, and the majority is weighed by value, not count.
Canadian draughts
International rules on a 12×12 board with thirty men a side — the longest game in the family.
Give-away draughts (Poddavki)Unrated
Russian rules turned inside out: the first player left with nothing on the board wins.
In one sentence
Draughts is played by moving pieces one square at a time and jumping over your opponent's. That is the whole of it, and it is enough to have kept the game alive for five hundred years and to have grown thirteen distinct codes, each with its own champions who consider the others a different sport.
What separates the codes is not the board so much as the answers they give to four questions. Can an ordinary piece capture backwards? Does a crowned piece slide one square or fly the length of the diagonal? When several captures are available, may you choose, or must you take the largest? And what exactly happens to a piece that reaches the far side in the middle of a jump?
This site plays every code under its own answers. Pick one and the board, the notation and the rules change with it.