Checkers

• Remember that captures are compulsory for your opponent too. Offering a piece is less a gift than an instruction: they must take it, so you can decide in advance where their piece will end up.
• That makes the two-for-one the most reliable move in the game. Give up one piece so the forced recapture lands their piece where a second piece of yours can jump it, and often a third behind that. Count the whole sequence before you commit.
• Under Italian rules the longest capture is compulsory, so when your opponent has a choice of jumps you can work out which one they are obliged to take. English rules let them take any capture, which makes them harder to steer.
• Keep your back row intact as long as you can. Every piece you move out of it opens a door, and one enemy man reaching that row becomes a King that comes back at you in all four directions.
• Push toward the centre rather than along the outside. A piece on the two outer columns can never be jumped, because the landing square would be off the board — but it has only one diagonal to move on, so it is safe and nearly useless. Use the edge to park a piece, not to advance.
• Advance in pairs, one piece behind and beside another, so that anything taken is immediately recaptured. An opponent who can see that will usually not take at all.
• Trade when you are ahead and avoid trading when you are behind. Swapping one for one at eight against six leaves you seven against five, a larger advantage than before.
• In the endgame, drive a lone enemy piece toward an edge. A piece against the side has half the escape squares of one in open ground, and two Kings together can close that space a square at a time.

Nothing here needs to be dragged, and nothing needs to be done quickly. You tap a piece, the squares it may move to turn green, and you tap the one you want; change your mind and tap a different piece of your own, and the green squares move with it. There is no clock of any kind, on a move or on the game, so the board can sit untouched as long as you like. Tapping the other side's piece by mistake does not open a dialogue box you have to dismiss — a line of text under the board says whose turn it is and then clears itself. Nothing ever covers the board. There is no keyboard control of the pieces, though Escape closes the side panel.

On a computer each square is 68 pixels across and the board is 544 pixels, in dark brown and tan. Pieces fill about four fifths of a square, White as near-white with a silver edge and Black as dark grey, so both read clearly on either colour of square, and a King is marked with the letter K. On a phone or a narrow window the board scales down to fit rather than running off the edge, and the two player panels move above it. Those panels show whose turn it is and keep a tally of games won during this sitting. Naming the players is optional: leave the boxes empty and you are Player 1 and Player 2, or Player 1 and Machine.

Draughts is older than chess as we now play it. Boards for a game called Alquerque, played on a grid of lines rather than squares, turn up in archaeological digs going back many centuries, and around the twelfth century somebody in the south of France put the pieces and the capture rule of Alquerque onto the sixty-four squares of a chessboard. The French called the result Jeu de Dames. The larger board allowed twelve pieces a side and far more room to plan, and it is essentially the game on the screen above.

It is also the game that first fell to a computer. Chinook, written from 1989 by a team at the University of Alberta led by Jonathan Schaeffer, played Marion Tinsley, world champion from 1955 to 1962 and again from 1975 to 1991. Tinsley beat the machine in 1992. In the 1994 rematch the two drew six games before Tinsley withdrew, gravely ill with pancreatic cancer, and Chinook took the title. The project ran until 2007, when Schaeffer's team announced that draughts had been solved outright: with perfect play on both sides, the game is a draw. That takes nothing away from the board, since two people who are not perfect still have everything to play for. For the same kind of thinking, try Four in a Row or the rest of our board games.

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