How to Play Checkers: Rules, Setup, and Your First Moves

Checkers looks simple enough to pick up by watching for thirty seconds, and mostly it is — right up until the mandatory jump rule blindsides someone who's never had it explained. This is the version of the rules aimed at someone who has genuinely never played before, not a refresher for someone who already knows the basics and wants strategy. Read it once, then play a free game of checkers to make it stick.

The board and starting setup

Checkers is played on a checkerboard of alternating light and dark squares, and only the dark squares are ever used — every piece, every move, every capture happens on those squares alone. American Checkers (also called English Draughts) uses an 8×8 board with 12 pieces per side. International Draughts uses a bigger 10×10 board with 20 pieces per side. Either way, each side's pieces fill the dark squares of their own first three rows, leaving two empty rows of dark squares in the middle where the actual game unfolds.

How pieces move

A regular piece — usually called a "man" — moves diagonally forward one square at a time, onto an empty dark square. It can never move backward, and it can never move onto a light square or a square another piece already occupies. That single restriction is what makes the opening phase feel slow and careful: every piece you push forward is a piece that can no longer retreat if the position turns against it.

Mandatory jumps: the rule beginners forget

Here's the rule that trips up almost every new player at least once: if a legal jump is available to you anywhere on the board, you have to take it. You cannot simply move a different piece instead and ignore the capture, even if taking the jump is clearly the worse trade. A jump itself works by hopping diagonally over an adjacent opposing piece into the empty square directly beyond it, removing the jumped piece from the board. And if the piece you just landed can immediately jump again, you have to keep jumping with that same piece until no further capture is available to it — a single turn can clear several pieces off the board this way.

Kings and crowning

Get one of your pieces all the way to the far row — the row furthest from where it started — and it gets crowned as a King, usually shown by stacking a second piece on top of it. A King gains the ability to move and capture diagonally backward as well as forward, unlike a regular piece. In Classic rules, a King still only moves one square at a time. In International rules, a King "flies": it can slide any number of empty squares along a diagonal in one move, and capture an enemy piece from a distance by jumping clear over it to any open square beyond — closer to how a bishop moves in chess than how a checkers piece usually does.

How a game of checkers actually ends

You win by capturing every one of your opponent's pieces, or — just as commonly — by leaving them with no legal move at all on their turn, even if they still have pieces left on the board. A player boxed into a corner with pieces that simply can't move anywhere loses exactly the same way as a player with zero pieces remaining.