Checkers Game - Play Draughts Online Free

How to use this tool

1. You play as Red (bottom). Click a red piece to select it.
2. Click a highlighted square to move or jump. Captures are mandatory, and if another jump is available with that piece, continue the chain before the AI moves.
3. Choose Easy, Medium, or Hard for the next game. Win by capturing all Black pieces or leaving Black with no legal moves.

About Checkers

Checkers (also called Draughts) is a classic two-player strategy board game played on an 8×8 board. Pieces move diagonally and can capture opponent pieces by jumping over them. When a piece reaches the opponent's back row it becomes a King, able to move in any diagonal direction.

Full rules

• Movement: regular pieces move diagonally forward only, one square at a time, to an unoccupied dark square.
• Capturing: jump over an adjacent opponent piece to an empty square beyond it. The captured piece is removed.
• Mandatory capture: if a capture is available, you must take it. If multiple captures are possible, you may choose which to take.
• Multiple jumps: after a capture, if the same piece can make another capture, it must continue jumping in the same turn (a chain capture). The game locks the selection to that piece and highlights only its next capture. A man that reaches the King row during a jump ends its turn immediately.
• Kinging: a piece reaching the last row on the opponent’s side is crowned King. Kings can move and capture in any diagonal direction.
• Winning: capture all opponent pieces, or place your opponent in a position where they have no legal moves.

Controls

Click a piece to select it. Valid moves are highlighted. Click a highlighted square to move. Choose Easy, Medium, or Hard to set the AI level for the next game; the current game keeps the level it started with.

The board, resumable game, selected AI level, and You W–AI L record stay in this browser. Move generation and AI search run locally; no board position is sent to a server. Existing saved games and win-loss totals remain usable after the rule and AI updates.

Strategy tips

• Control the center: pieces in the center of the board have more mobility and threaten more squares than edge pieces.
• Keep your back row intact: your back row prevents the opponent from getting Kings. Advance pieces from the center while keeping some back-row pieces in place.
• Trade advantageously: sacrifice a piece only when you gain a King or create a forced multi-jump sequence in return.
• King priority: getting Kings before your opponent creates a significant positional and mobility advantage.

AI difficulty

The built-in AI uses minimax with alpha-beta pruning and scores material, Kings, advancement, center control, and back-row protection. Easy searches up to 2 complete-turn plies, Medium up to 4, and Hard up to 6. Here, a ply is one side's complete turn: a multi-jump chain counts as one ply, even though it contains several individual jumps. An 18,000-node search budget keeps work bounded in the browser, so a search may stop before it reaches its depth target. The chosen level applies when you start a new game.

Checkers variants

Opening theory and the solved game

American checkers has been weakly solved by Jonathan Schaeffer and the Chinook team at the University of Alberta. In 2007, they published a proof that perfect play from both sides results in a draw. This makes checkers the most complex game ever solved. Classic openings have names - such as the "Old Fourteenth" and the "Cross" - and opening theory books rival chess in depth. Despite the game being solved, human play at club level remains competitive and interesting.