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⚽ Sports and games ♟️ Games and hobbies

Draughts

Draughts

📖 In short

Draughts, or checkers, is a game where two players face each other on a board of 64 white and black squares, like a chessboard. Each player has twelve round, flat pieces and tries to capture all the opponent's pieces or stop them moving.

🤩 Did you know?

  • The board has 64 squares.
  • Each player has 12 pieces.
  • In some countries draughts is played on a bigger board with 100 squares.
  • Draughts is easier to learn than chess, but it takes a lot of brainpower.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Moving diagonally

Pieces move only on the dark squares, one step diagonally forward. At the start each player's pieces sit on the three rows nearest them.

🔍 Jumping and capturing

If an opponent's piece is next to yours with an empty square behind it, you jump over it and take it off the board. Sometimes you can make several jumps in a row and capture several pieces!

💡 The king

If one of your pieces reaches the last row on your opponent's side, it becomes a “king”, with another piece placed on top, and it can move forward and backward.

🎯 An old toy

Historians think draughts developed from an old Arab game called “al-qirq”, which passed with the Arabs to al-Andalus and then Europe. It's a popular game in Arab countries, in cafés and homes.

📸 More pictures

Draughts

🧩 Test yourself

1 How many pieces does each player have in draughts?

2 What does a piece become when it reaches the last row?

3 The board has ?? squares.

4 Which picture shows “Draughts”?

⚽ Discover more

📷 Picture sources: Wikimedia Commons