How to Play Checkers: Rules, Setup, and Scoring

If you want to know how to play checkers, the short version is this: it’s a two-player capture game on a checkerboard where jumps are forced, not optional, and the first player to clear the board or trap their opponent wins. This page covers standard American checkers, also called English draughts — the rule set almost everyone in the US and UK means by “checkers” — and notes where international draughts and common house rules do things differently. Like backgammon and dominoes, it’s a game you can set up and start in under a minute with no hidden information to track.

Checkers rules: how to play checkers in a nutshell

This page describes standard American checkers (English draughts): an eight-by-eight board, twelve pieces per side, and men that move and capture diagonally forward only. Where international draughts or a regional house rule changes something — board size, capture direction, how kings move — that difference is called out in its own section rather than blended in as if there were only one way to play.

Setup and the starting position

Checkers is played on the same 64-square board as chess, with 32 light squares and 32 dark squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Only the dark squares are ever used — pieces never sit on or move across a light square. Each player takes 12 pieces of one color and fills every dark square in the three rows closest to them, leaving the two middle rows completely empty to start.

Orient the board the same way chess players do: each player should have a dark square at their own bottom-left corner. That convention decides which twelve dark squares belong to which player and keeps both sides’ starting rows mirrored exactly.

The diagram below shows the completed setup: solid pieces fill the dark squares of the three rows farthest from this view, outlined pieces fill the dark squares of the three nearest rows, and the middle two rows sit empty between them.

Decide who moves first however you like — standard play has the darker-colored pieces move first, so a coin flip or card draw for color effectively decides it.

How a turn works

On your turn you either move one of your pieces or, if a capture is available, make a capture instead. An ordinary move slides a man one square diagonally forward, onto an empty dark square — never sideways, never straight ahead, and never backward for a man. A capture works differently: if an enemy piece sits diagonally in front of one of yours with an empty square directly beyond it on the same diagonal, you jump over the enemy piece, land on that empty square, and remove the jumped piece from the board.

Capturing in checkers is not optional. If any legal jump is available to you anywhere on the board, you must take a jump rather than make an ordinary move, and you must jump with a piece that can jump even if a different piece of yours would rather just slide forward. If your first jump lands you in a position where another jump is immediately available with that same piece, you have to keep jumping — a single turn can clear two, three, or more enemy pieces this way, and it only stops once the jumping piece has no further capture open to it or reaches the king row. When more than one jump or jump sequence is available at the start of your turn, you get to pick which one to take; the rules don’t force you to choose the sequence that captures the most pieces, only to capture with something. One historical rule you will not meet at a serious table anymore is “huffing,” where a player who skipped an available jump could have that piece removed by the opponent instead of being made to jump — it was dropped from tournament play decades ago, and modern rules simply require the jump to be played.

Kings

A man that reaches the farthest row from where it started — the king row — is crowned a king the moment it lands there, usually by stacking a second piece of the same color on top of it. Reaching the king row always ends that piece’s turn immediately, even in the middle of what would otherwise have been a multi-jump; a man cannot be crowned and then keep jumping again until its owner’s following turn.

A king keeps the same one-square step as a man but can take that step diagonally in any of the four directions — forward or backward — and the same goes for capturing: a king can jump an adjacent enemy piece and land on the empty square beyond it whether that piece is ahead of it or behind it. Because kings threaten in both directions, they’re generally far more valuable late in the game than men are, and protecting your own back row from giving the opponent an easy king matters from early in the game onward.

Winning the game

You win standard checkers one of two ways: capture every one of your opponent’s pieces, or reach a position where your opponent has no legal move at all, whether because they have no pieces left that can move or because every move available to them is physically blocked. Either condition ends the game immediately in your favor — there’s no running score to track across a single game the way there is in a trick-taking card game or a cribbage match.

How the game ends in a draw

Not every game ends in a capture-out or a block. If a long stretch of play passes with no capture made and no new king crowned, either player may claim a draw rather than let the game run on forever — tournament rules commonly set that limit at 40 moves, and a position that repeats three times with the same player to move is also treated as a draw. Casual games often skip these counts entirely and simply agree to call it a draw by eye once neither side can make progress.

Common variations and house rules

This page describes standard American checkers (English draughts): an eight-by-eight board, twelve men per side, and forward-only capturing for men. International draughts, the game most of continental Europe plays competitively, changes several of those basics at once: it uses a ten-by-ten board with twenty pieces per side, lets men capture backward as well as forward, and crowns a “flying king” that can slide any distance along an open diagonal rather than moving just one square at a time, picking up multiple pieces across a long diagonal run in a single jump. Other regional rule sets, like Italian and Spanish draughts, keep the eight-by-eight board but add their own twists on which jumps are compulsory and how kings capture.

Casual house rules vary too, and it’s worth agreeing on them before you start: some tables let men capture backward even under otherwise-standard rules, some skip the draw-by-move-count entirely, and some still play with “give-away” checkers, where the objective is flipped and losing all your pieces first is the win. None of those are part of the standard rules this page describes, but they’re common enough at a kitchen table that it’s worth knowing when you’ve sat down to a variant rather than the tournament game. If you’re looking for another easy-to-learn classic to set up next, mahjong and mancala both share checkers’ quality of being simple to teach and quick to get a game going.