The history of Chinese Checkers

It starts with Halma, in Boston

Chinese Checkers is neither Chinese nor checkers. It is a German adaptation of an American game, given a Chinese-sounding name by a New York toy company in 1928 because that was good marketing.

The original is Halma — Greek for "jump" — invented around 1883–84 by George Howard Monks, a Boston surgeon, reportedly inspired by an English game called Hoppity. Halma is played on a square 16×16 board, with each player's pieces starting in a corner and moving to the opposite corner by the same step-and-jump rules we still use.

Halma was a hit in its own right, and it is still played competitively in some countries. What it lacked was elegance for more than two players: a square board has four corners, so three or six players cannot be arranged symmetrically.

1892: the German star board

The fix came from Germany. In 1892 the publisher Ravensburger released Stern-Halma — "star Halma" — which replaced the square with a six-pointed star. The change is small and brilliant:

• Six points means two, three or six players all get a symmetrical position.
• The triangular lattice gives each hole six neighbours instead of eight, which makes jump chains longer and more structured.
• The star's geometry forces every route through the central hexagon, so players interfere with each other whether they want to or not.

Germany still calls the game Sternhalma, and it has never been marketed there as Chinese.

1928: the name that stuck

Stern-Halma reached the United States in the 1920s. In 1928 the brothers Bill and Jack Pressman, of the Pressman toy company in New York, marketed it as "Hop Ching Checkers" and shortly afterwards as Chinese Checkers.

The reason was commercial. America in the 1920s was in the middle of a craze for mah-jong and for Chinese-styled goods generally, and an exotic name sold better than a German compound noun. There is no Chinese ancestry, no Chinese predecessor, and no connection to any traditional Chinese game.

The 1930s American boom made it a standard household game across the English-speaking world, and it has stayed one: cheap to produce, quick to teach, and playable by up to six people, which very few abstract games manage.

The modern game

Chinese Checkers has no world championship and no governing body, but it has a real competitive following online, where the two-player game is treated as a serious abstract. Computer analysis has shown what strong players already knew: the game rewards long-term ladder construction far more than short-term advancement, and the difference between casual and expert play is enormous.

Its ancestor has not disappeared either. Halma on the square board is still played, particularly in Europe, and the two games illustrate a useful lesson in design: the rules barely changed, and the board change alone turned a decent two-player game into a family classic.

Common questions