The Complete Guide to Checkers

Chapter 1: What Is Checkers and Why People Love It

Let's get one thing straight right away: checkers is not the game you remember from a rainy afternoon at your grandmother's house, where two kids flipped the board after six minutes because they were bored and wanted to go outside. That version of checkers is real, and it's fine, but it's only the shallow end of a much deeper pool.

Real checkers — the hobby, the thing people study and play for decades — is a game of quiet, intense pattern recognition. It's played on an 8x8 board with 24 pieces, 12 red and 12 black. The board is square, the pieces are small flat disks, and the rules are simple enough to learn in about ten minutes. Red moves first. You move one piece diagonally forward one square on each turn. You capture an opponent's piece by jumping over it into the empty square directly beyond. If you reach the far side of the board, your piece becomes a "king" — often marked by stacking a captured piece on top — and kings can move backward as well as forward. That's the entire ruleset. You can learn it before your coffee gets cold.

And yet, here's the thing that surprises most people: checkers is a solved game in the computer science sense, meaning that with perfect play from both sides, the game is a draw. Every time. A computer has proven that if both players play flawlessly, nobody wins.