Kevin HY Hau - Hello World 👋

📖 Rules of Dama

Draughts without diagonals. Each side has 16 men on the second and third rows. White (bottom) moves first. Win by capturing every enemy piece or leaving the other side with no legal move.

Men

• A man steps one square forward or sideways. Never backward, never diagonally.
• A man captures by jumping an adjacent enemy piece, forward or sideways, onto the empty square right behind it. Never backward.
• A man that reaches the far row becomes a king.

Kings

• A king moves any number of empty squares along a row or column, like a rook.
• It captures a piece at any distance along a line, if there is at least one empty square just behind it, and lands on any empty square beyond (you choose). It can never jump two pieces in a row.
• In a chain of captures a king may turn a corner but not reverse straight back.

Captures are compulsory

• If you can capture, you must. If there are several ways, you must take the one that captures the most pieces (a king counts as one piece, like a man). If they tie, you choose.
• Captured pieces are removed straight away, so later jumps in the same chain can pass over the squares they left, and a piece may even come back through its own starting square.
• A man that reaches the far row in the middle of a chain carries on as a man (sideways only) and is crowned when the chain ends.

Draws in this version

• The same position three times, or 100 plies with no capture and no man move. A lone king against a lone man is treated as a draw by that rule.

Playing here

• Tap a piece, then a square. Dots show where it can go. In a capture chain you can tap the final square, or tap hop by hop if two routes end on the same square. You can also drag.
• The computer sees the compulsory captures, so it is careful about exchanges, but it is a casual player. Hard thinks about 1.5 seconds.