The history of checkers and draughts

Alquerque, and the game that moved onto a chess board

Checkers is older than chess in its raw materials and younger than chess in its rules. Its ancestor is alquerque, a capture-by-jumping game played on a five-by-five grid of lines, known across the ancient Mediterranean and described in detail in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile in 1283.

The modern game appears in France around 1100, where it was called fierges or ferses — after the chess queen — because somebody had the idea of playing alquerque on a sixty-four square chess board, using only one colour of square. By the fourteenth century the French were calling it jeu de dames, the name it still has across much of Europe.

The rule that defines the modern game — compulsory capture — arrived later. French players adopted it in the sixteenth century, and the version without it survived alongside as a separate game called le plaisant. Compulsory capture won, because it makes combinations possible.

Draughts in Britain and America

English draughts became a working-class game with a serious competitive culture, particularly in Scotland and the north of England. William Payne published an English treatise in 1756, and the nineteenth century produced a championship tradition with named matches — Anderson against Wyllie, and later the great American and British champions — followed in the press like boxing.

The competitive game hit a problem familiar to chess: the openings ran out. By the late 1800s top players had analysed the standard opening moves so thoroughly that games were drawn before they began. The answer was the three-move ballot: the first three moves of each game are drawn at random from a list of accepted openings, forcing players into unfamiliar positions. It is still how serious tournaments are run.

Marion Tinsley, the greatest player of any game

Marion Tinsley (1927–1995), an American mathematician, has a case for being the most dominant competitor in the history of any game. Over forty-five years of play he lost, in total, seven games. He was world champion from 1955 to 1958 and again from 1975, resigning the title twice rather than losing it.

In 1990 he began playing against Chinook, the University of Alberta program led by Jonathan Schaeffer. Their 1992 match went to Tinsley, 4 wins to 2 with 33 draws. In the 1994 rematch, after six drawn games, Tinsley withdrew on medical advice; he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died the following year. Chinook was awarded the title, in the most uncomfortable circumstances any machine-versus-human contest has produced.

Tinsley's reaction to a Chinook move in 1990 has become the game's most famous anecdote: told the program had played a particular move, he replied that it would regret it — and the analysis later showed a loss that began, by Tinsley's reckoning, some sixty-four moves before the end.

Solved: 2007

In 2007, Schaeffer's team announced that English draughts was solved: with perfect play by both sides, the game is a draw. It took eighteen years of computation, and the result is weakly solved — the proof covers the lines needed to guarantee a draw from the start, not every position on the board.

It remains one of the largest problems ever solved by brute force. The search space is around 5×10²⁰ positions, and the method combined a forward search from the opening with endgame databases built backwards from every position with ten pieces or fewer.

The by-product matters more than the result: the ten-piece endgame databases are freely available, and any player can now check whether an endgame is a win, a loss or a draw — a resource no nineteenth-century champion could have imagined.

The draughts family around the world

"Checkers" is one member of a large family, and the differences are not cosmetic:

International draughts is the largest competitive scene, with professional players in the Netherlands, France, the Baltic states, Russia and West Africa — Senegal and Ivory Coast have produced world-class players.

Common questions