Talk:Draughts

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[edit] Canadian Checkers

I'm Canadian, and I've never heard of checkers played on a 12x12 grid with 30 pieces. In fact, I've got a checkers board beside me (in addition to Chess and Backgammon boards..I'm a board-game-aholic), and it's an 8x8 grid. Does anyone have any cites for this "Canadian checkers"? --72.141.60.5 00:22, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Canadian Checkers ("Dames")

I'm also Canadian, and had never heard of this version. According to the history in the Association québécoise des joueurs de dames, this version of the game was popular in French speaking communities within Ontario, Quebec, and New England and may predate the cession of New France to the English.

[edit] "Draughts" vs "Checkers"

A Google search for "draughts game" turns up 2,060,000 results. A Google search for "checkers game" turns up 6,320,000 results.

Is there some reason why this article is biased towards the less popular British name? If Wikipedia's policy is to prioritize the oldest name over the most common name, then probably we should be using some even more ancient tongue.

The general rule is to write articles in the appropriate style of English to the theme of an article (such as American English for US-centric subjects and British English for articles concerning more British themes. Where no particular leaning applies (such as in this case) the general rule is to not change the style the article was started in and to have redirects in the alternative. One might add tthe point that while checkers generally refers to the game in the article, it can refer to other unrelated games such as Chinese checkers. In contrast, Draughts is a specific term for the game and its vairantes in this article. Dainamo 10:31, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

America is better than other countries, so "checkers" should be used. 75.1.246.104 15:54, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Untrue. As a country america is barely tolerable because it contains far too many people like the one who posted the above comment.

Right. Because no other country is full of that sort of guy. . .

Off-topic, unfortunately, America is full of these 10-year old idiots on the Internet. I wouldn't be surprised that the amount of young people on the Internet from America is disproportionate to the amounts in other countries, as evidenced by the above. Anyways, I say it should be called draughts because Wikipedia has a general inclination to use American English (any "civilisation" or "centre" will be removed and replaced with "civilization" or "center" within days or weeks) words, and also that there seem to be more Americans using the Internet in general. --76.188.148.173 01:04, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Many more poeple call it checkers than call it draughts. The title "Draughts" only serves to confuse people who want to learn about checkers. (PS- show some American pride! U-S-A! U-S-A!) 12va34 19:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Shoot, I meant that we should call it checkers. My bad. Anyways, after using Google Trends and Google, I found that searches for checkers far outnumber those for draughts, even in the United Kingdom (for the most part) and that there are a little above 1 million hits for draughts and a little under 10 million for checkers. Also, my Firefox spellchecker doesn't seem to recognize draughts either (if that counts for anything). --76.188.148.173 11:23, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
My British English Firefox spellchecker doesn't recognise "spellchecker", or "Firefox", or "center", or "Wikipedia". Doesn't mean that those words should be removed/changed. As for the google test, we are sometimes hesitant about using that, as Google results (and indeed the internet itself) is often very American-centred. On top of that, a word like "Checkers" can be very ambiguous, so any search for checkers will bring up results for all of those, while a search for draughts will only be results for this game. The same state of affairs goes for check over cheque. Our article is at cheque. Likewise, Aluminum has more results than Aluminium, but Aluminum is pretty much exclusively in American usage, and this is an English language encyclopedia, so we go with the most common usage in the English speaking world, which is Aluminium. --Dreaded Walrus t c 03:26, 31 July 2007 (UTC)


The term "checker" could also be "one who checks" and there are many instances where google will return a hit for "checkers" that is not related to the game.

GothicChessInventor 19:13, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

So how does the ambiguity of the term in relation to searching decide whether it should be checkers/draughts. Nobody's going to be thrown off if they get a reply for checker's restaurant Also if how the article was written in originally was flawed, then it should be changed not just left the same. The issue is that in this one language they're are two terms that see very widespread use in their respective areas, the US and Britain. I'm not really sure which should be used, but as far as I can tell the current use of draughts has little basis, checkers at least appears to be more popular; which still seems like a somewhat poor basis for encyclo use. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 63.230.55.25 (talk • contribs).

Hi. Do not edit other people's comments, as you did here. Remember that saying "checkers appears to be more popular" is based, probably, on US culture. In the UK, "draughts" is more popular. In the US, "checkers" is more popular. --Dreaded Walrus t c 01:23, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I think a good question is, which term is better known. Most of my brittish friends know it by draughts AND/OR checkers. Few americans would recognize draughts as the name of this game.--71.97.131.193 01:06, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

But that is flawed logic. If British people know what the American name for something is, but the reverse doesn't apply, that just means that British people have been exposed to more US culture than Americans have to British culture. Most British people know that when an American says football, they mean American football, and when they say soccer, they mean what we here in the UK would call football. Does that mean that we should move American football to football, and football (soccer) to soccer? Of course not. --Dreaded Walrus t c 01:19, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
Its not flawed logic if your goal is being accessible to the greatest number of people. If most Americans (including this one who just got to the page through random article) only know the game as checkers and most British know the game as both draughts and checkers, checkers is obviously more accessible. I don't really think it matters, though, since the redirect works fine. Atropos 02:53, 13 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Checkers has been solved?

I thought this game has been exhaustively solved for 8x8 at least. Any mention about that? --Sigmundur 09:37, 9 June 2007 (UTC)


That is correct. Using computers, scientists have explored all possible moves in the game (roughly 500 billion billion possible positions) and come to the conclusion that perfect play on both sides leads to a draw. This finding was published in the scientific journal Science (Schaeffer et al., Checkers Is Solved, Science, 14 September 2007;317(5844):1518-1522.). -- Pierre


Sorry, my comment above is inaccurate. Not every move in the game was actually explored. The method used was slightly more complex. -- Pierre

[edit] Rules not complete

  • it does not say how a king can capture
  • it should say if capture is allowed backwards for non-kings
  • it should say how to do multiple captures (not just say its possible)

I would change it myself, but I don't know them!

I guess someone recently added these requests above, but there one more thing:
  • there is no mention that the left down tile is dark. --Luxvero 14:09, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Variants not included

In some variants:

  • Kings don't need to stop immediately after the last captured piece, but anywhere in the uninterrupted diagonal of vacant tiles next to the last captured piece.
  • Capturing is NOT mandatory, you may choose not to capture by removing the piece that is about to make the jump; when you have 2 pieces in position to capture, only 1 must be removed, this does not counts has a move.

Usually only the second rule is included in the so called "Brazilian checkers" creating this unnamed variant, largely played by amateurs in Brazil.


[edit] What version was I playing?

I never played where jumping is mandatory, and I never played where kings can move like a bishop. Their only advantage was that they could move backwards and normal pieces couldn't.

I've played a version the same as English Draughts except that you started with two ranks of men (8 pieces) and you could jump your own men and kings. It made the game very different. In one version you could jump both your men and other men in a sequence and in the other version you couldn't. The people who played it called it checkers and didn't believe my rules (I play English Checkers/Draughts rules). I'm not sure what this version is called.

Interesting. When you jumped your own men, were you required to remove them from the board, like when you jumped the other men? Or do you leave your own men on the board, like "chinese checkers" ?

[edit] Simple beginner's question

The rules here (and everywhere else that I've looked) don't explicitly say what happens when a piece is on the side or edge of the board. When there is no opposite square, is the piece invulnerable to attack unless moved? MrZaius 199.8.170.224 17:26, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Yes. When a piece is on the side or edge, that piece is invulnerable to attack. However, it can be drawn out with a forced jump, or by blocking all the other pieces so that it is the only piece free to move.

[edit] merging "checkers" and "draughts"

I think the redirect to check

[edit] One minute game?

Does the game really only take one minute to complete? You have to take all the opponents pieces, that is 20 pieces, so at least 60 moves. Can the game really be played with less than one second per move? I doubt even a robotic arm could move pieces that quick. JayKeaton 16:30, 30 June 2007 (UTC)

Agreed. Even with an 8x8 board and 8 pieces on each team, there will be 4+ moves from either player that don't involve taking + 8 moves that do + 7 moves from the losing player before he loses. So this one minute estimation suggests there will be at least one move every three seconds. That's for an unrealistically short game with rules that are not commonly used and with the losing player trying to lose. I would chage the estimated figure but that would be original research so I've deleted it.--81.131.16.144 21:16, 2 July 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Flying Kings

When I was a kid, when we played checkers with "flying kings" it meant that the king could jump any other piece on that same diagonal, no matter how many spaces away it was. Was this just some variant made up by some bored kids, or is this also a variant of the flying kings rule? ~~Unknown Person

That is the Brazilian variant. Flying kings are also used in some other variations such as international draughts. 66.30.113.23 16:35, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Checkers solved

Why didn't it make the lead that checkers is solved? (Posted by User:Gnixon sometime on 7/19.)

Here's a good article on it.
The game of checkers, as such, has not been solved—only the 8×8 variant is claimed to be solved. The majority of the world plays the more interesting 10×10 variant which remains unsolved.
—Herbee 16:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Really? I've always played it on the same board as chess. Gnixon 19:33, 20 July 2007 (UTC) ... which, I see from the lead of the article, is probably because I'm American. Gnixon 19:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

The Seattle Times article is wrong. It contradicts the other sources by overstating the result to say that the program can choose the best move from any position. Only 21 of the 156 three move sequences have been declared solved. This is why the other reference to the solution calls it a weak solution, not a complete solution. I corrected the statement of the result. 66.30.113.23 16:33, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The currect description of the weak solution is wrong. They did not go through anything close to all positions. 66.30.113.23 02:36, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

The LA Times article is wrong. Not all positions are in the search tree. Not all positions were solved. The paper in Science is available, linked to http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/publications/solving_checkers.html, so don't trust a reporter's interpretation instead. 66.30.113.23 02:07, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Why taken out?

Why was the following taken out? It seems very important to me:

In 2007, draughts was reported to be solved by a computer program. [1]

Bubba73 (talk), 14:55, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

It's already in the article, under History. 64.126.24.11 18:20, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] My Notes on 8x8 Draughts (American Checkers)

Hello everyone, I am Ed Trice and I did help in some very small way with checkers being solved. You can see from http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook/thankyou/ that I helped to verify the correctness of the endgame databases. Anyway, I did some cleanup regarding some inaccurate statements that were posted in the Wikipedia article. While there are 500,995,484,682,338,672,639 unique checkers positions, these were not all "solved" in order to solve the game of checkers. About 39 trillion positions were "solved" meaning for any of them, their status as being won, lost, or drawn is known. With a massive forward search, these precomputed endgames cannot be avoided. Therefore, as the "front end" hit the "back end" the game was solved.

Also, there was a note about Blondie24 being in there. That really did not belong. I played that program in 1996, and I caputured all of its pieces by move 30. That's hard to do when you consider that 12 moves are jumps to take the pieces off the board! I saw no reason to mention an extremely weak program in the same paragraph as the one that has solved the game. There are much stronger programs that deserve mention.

With my regards,

GothicChessInventor 19:10, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Where is the Discussion ?

I am pretty sure yesterday I added some text to a discussion here, now it appears entirely blank.

GothicChessInventor 17:13, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. It was deleted yesterday, and I guess noone picked up on it. I've restored the page now. --Dreaded Walrus t c 17:20, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Draughts = Sport??

I have removed the [[Category:Sports]] insertion as I don't believe there is a consensus that this article is to be classified under "Sports". (Whether it is a sport or not is another consideration.) If there is disagreement, please discuss here. --Craw-daddy | T | 09:58, 29 April 2008 (UTC)