This guide focuses on how to play checkers, the aim of checkers is either to capture every one of the opponent’s pieces, called the man, or make it impossible for them to move any of their pieces. The goal is to capture or trap and prevent any moves.
You may capture an opponent’s piece and knock them off a normal checkerboard as long as you are successful in jumping on the opponent’s checkers. Players can move quickly on the opponent’s side of the board by jumping diagonally across opponents’ pieces and removing them from the board like the piece you’re capturing.
When a player’s pieces reach the final row on an opponent’s side of the board, a player may use one of his captured pieces to crown that piece as the King. In the game of checkers, both opponents are trying to capture each opponent’s piece, moving their pieces towards the other player’s side of the board. The player with the black pieces starts a Checkers by moving each piece diagonally toward their opponent. The players then alternate turns moving pieces diagonally forward onto a darker square.
Players only play on dark squares on a checkerboard, leaving the lighter squares empty. Choose who will play dark checkers and light checkers, and then arrange their 12 pieces onto the typical Checkerboard: Each player must have three rows of four, and checkers placed only on the dark squares. Players will place their disks (pieces) on 32 light ones.
To set up a match, each player places his or her 12 discs in a square that is the closest to them, taking up three rows in total. To play, each player sets their 12 pieces up in 3 rows on their sides at the bottom, first. The boards are placed such that each player has one bright square on the right-hand corner closest to them.
Once the piece is captured, it is removed from the checkerboard and collected by an opponent. Capture means if an opponents piece is on a square that you would normally be moving to, and an empty space is diagonally behind, your piece can move through both spaces instead of just one, jumping the piece over this is when you remove a captured Checkerboard piece from play. The jumping has to happen diagonally, and although you can only take one piece with each jumping, you can take several jumpings with a single checker. The winner in Checkers is the player who has captured all the pieces first.
