Checkers Variants

Checkers, called Draughts in most of the world, is generally considered to be inferior to chess in my country, the United States. When I was a teenager, I was surprised to learn that checkers is actually played differently in most of the world - American/English checkers is just one of dozens of variants around the world.

While I have mostly discussed my project on checkers-oriented fora, I thought some of you would be interested in my checkers research project. I have documented the rules for every checkers game I can find around the world in a single spreadsheet (linked here) where you find nearly 50 national variants. In the future I hope to have a website where you can play them all.

If there is some local variant that you play which isn't on my list, please let me know. It doesn't matter whether you play Mozambican checkers, or West Siberian checkers, I think everything should be preserved as part of the common cultural heritage of humanity. Actually, that is the motivation of ongoing project that I have posted about here too - my Table Games Academy website.

In fact, I would view all of my life's work as trying to use technology to unify humanity while highlighting our differences, whether it's documenting all the calendars on Earth, making Braille for every language around the world, or even researching all the different pizza styles found in North America.

Sorry to get off topic :D I hope you all have a great day and thanks for reading, regards from New York.

I haven't played checkers in over 25 years. I think this was the last checkers game I played.

Ever own Zillions of Games? It has a scripting language where you can create rules for pretty much any boardgame that uses fairly generic board/pieces (e.g. nothing like Monopoly). There were quite a few versions of draughts/checkers written for it, and pretty much all of them, in their descriptions, just had a standard list of "Can you..." / "How do..." things very similar to your spreadsheet's columns.

I heard of Zillions while researching this, but sadly I have never owned a Windows computer so I cannot get it

When I hear about Checkers, I think of a straw man argument—all you history nerds get it!

Quote: smoothgrh

When I hear about Checkers, I think of a straw man argument—all you history nerds get it!
link to original post

Apparently, I am not a history nerd. When I hear Checkers I think of hamburgers.

Quote: DRich

Quote: smoothgrh

When I hear about Checkers, I think of a straw man argument—all you history nerds get it!
link to original post

Apparently, I am not a history nerd. When I hear Checkers I think of hamburgers.
link to original post

I think of "My fellow Americans..."

I've no idea how it came about, but "Checkers" is buried in the Bid-A-Wee cemetery on Long Island. I'm not aware of any other Nixon connection to the Island.

Quote: DRich

Quote: smoothgrh

When I hear about Checkers, I think of a straw man argument—all you history nerds get it!
link to original post

Apparently, I am not a history nerd. When I hear Checkers I think of hamburgers.
link to original post

I think of their fries.