Dama Linda — Checkers and draughts: how the game is | damalinda.com
One family, four rule sets: the board, the army, the king and the capture rule all change — pick the game that fits your table.
The same family of games answers to three names — draughts in the UK, checkers in the US, damas in Spain and Portugal, where the crowned piece is the dama — and splits into four mainstream variants. Every one of them except international draughts is played on an 8×8 board.
English draughts, the American checkers game, is the compact member: 64 squares, 12 men per side on the dark squares of rows 2 and 3, and a king that moves exactly one square diagonally. Its men may capture backwards but can never move backwards.
International draughts is the big board: 10×10, 100 squares, 20 men per side filling 40 of the 50 dark squares. Its flying king slides any distance along a clear diagonal and may turn after each jump, and its majority rule forces the longest capture chain — a branch taking 4 men beats one taking 2.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Brazilian draughts is the bridge between the two: it keeps the English start of 12 men per side on an 8×8 board but adopts the flying king. Turkish draughts breaks the pattern entirely — 16 men per side on rows 2 and 3 with the back row left empty, and men that move only forwards or sideways.
Draw rules vary by ruleset rather than by variant name: federations commonly declare a draw after 25–50 consecutive moves with no capture and no promotion. Where a value is not fixed by the four-variant summary behind this guide — the Turkish king's move, for instance — the table marks it with a dash rather than a guess.
New players should start with English draughts and add the flying king through Brazilian play. The setup page walks through the board and the first moves, and the capture page details the majority rule and exactly what happens at promotion.
Further reading