Why frogs?

Checkers is a jumping game, and frogs are the best jumpers in any pond. So our pieces are frogs, one team green and one team pink.

Checkers is only played on the dark squares, so those became lily pads and the light squares are open water. A frog that gets jumped hops off its pad into the pond with a splash. A frog that reaches the far side gets a small lily-flower crown.

A bit of real draughts history

Checkers is the American name. In Britain the same game is called draughts. It grew out of alquerque, an older jumping game played on a grid of five by five points. The earliest sure mention of alquerque, under the Arabic name quirkat, is in a book whose author died in 976. In the Middle Ages, players in Europe moved the pieces onto a chessboard, 12 a side. Historians disagree about where that first happened. The early game was called fierges, after fers, the old name for the queen in chess.

The rule that you must jump when you can is credited to France around 1535. That stricter game was called jeu forcé, and it is the one that became English draughts. The first known book on the game was printed in Valencia, Spain, in 1547. The first one in English was written in 1756 by William Payne, a mathematician in London.

In Malaysia the game is called dam. In 1915 the British scholar R. J. Wilkinson wrote that the Dutch had brought the game to Malaya, along with its Dutch name, main dam. The one difference he noted from the European game was that a crowned piece could capture from any distance along a slant. Our crowned frogs keep to the English rule and jump one pad at a time.

In 2007 a team at the University of Alberta led by Jonathan Schaeffer showed that if both sides play perfectly, English checkers is a draw. Their program, Chinook, had won the human world championship back in 1994, the first program to win a human world title in any game.

The pond animals

• Snail: hops any frog it likes, at random.
• Turtle: looks at its own hop and your reply, and tries not to lose a frog.
• Swan: thinks 4 moves ahead and likes to set up double jumps.
• Otter: thinks 6 to 9 moves ahead, depending on your device, and swaps frogs when it is winning.

How to play

• You play green and go first. Tap a frog, then tap a lily pad to hop there.
• Frogs hop one pad on a slant, forward only. To capture, jump over a pink frog onto the empty pad behind it.
• Jumping is a must. If you can jump, a red ring shows which frog has to do it. If the same frog can jump again, it keeps going in the same turn.
• A frog that reaches the far row gets a lily crown and can then hop and jump backward too.
• You win when every pink frog is in the pond, or when pink has no hop left. If 40 moves each go by with only crowned frogs moving and no jumps, the game is a draw.
• Beat an animal to meet the next one. Stars for a win: 1 for any win, 2 with 4 or more of your frogs left, 3 with 8 or more. Using undo takes one star off.
• Pick 2 players to share one device. On a keyboard, use the arrow keys and Enter.
• Sound is on to start. Tap 🔊 to mute, or 🎵 for music.
• Earn 3 stickers in this game for your QuickBOP sticker book.

Tips

Keep your back row. While your frogs sit on the row nearest you, pink frogs cannot land there to get a crown. Move those frogs last.

Trade when you are ahead. If you have 6 frogs to 5, swapping one for one makes it 5 to 4, then 4 to 3. Your lead stays the same size while the other side runs out of frogs.

Use the must-jump rule. Because jumping is compulsory, you can offer one frog on purpose. The pink frog that takes it lands where you can jump two.

Your turn

Twelve green frogs are sitting on their lily pads at the top of this page. Start with the Snail, work up to the Otter, and play.