About afrodraughts.co.za
Four games, twenty-two codes, and why each one gets a page of its own.
This site hosts a family of jumping games: draughts in thirteen national codes, and its cousins Fanorona, Alquerque and Surakarta. They are grouped together because they answer the same question — what happens when two pieces meet on a line — and because a draughts player is usually curious about the others.
Every code is played under its own rules rather than a convenient average of them. English draughts opens with Black and has short kings; Italian forbids a man to capture a king and fixes a four-step order of priority; Turkish is played on all sixty-four squares and moves orthogonally. Each has its own rating, because they are different games to the people who play them.
How it is built
The rules live in one place, as a set of pure engines, and everything else asks them. The server decides every move in an online game, so the board you see is the board the rules agree with. Your browser carries its own copy of the same rules, so a local game or a game against the computer needs no network at all, and the two are tested against each other move for move.
The games themselves
These games are public domain. Their rules, boards and historical names belong to everybody. What is ours is this implementation: the code, the artwork, and the words on these pages, all made for this site. Where a page draws on published rule books or histories, it cites them rather than copying them.