Checkers
Jump and capture your way to victory
Checkers is played on the dark squares of an eight by eight board, twelve pieces a side. Pieces step one diagonal forward, and you capture by jumping. Captures are mandatory, which is the whole game: every piece you offer forces a reply, so most losses start with a trade you did not see coming.
How to play
Playing Checkers
- 1
Move only on the dark squares; the light half of the board stays empty all game.
- 2
Tap one of your pieces, then tap the empty dark square diagonally ahead of it.
- 3
Capture by jumping an adjacent enemy piece and landing on the empty square right behind it.
- 4
Take every jump on offer, and if the landing square sets up another jump, keep going.
- 5
Reach the far row to crown a king, which can then move and jump backward too.
- 6
Lose when your last piece is gone, or when you have no legal move on your turn.
Tactics
Three ways to get better at Checkers
Hold the back row
Your back row is the only thing keeping an enemy piece from crowning. Keep the two pieces guarding your first and third dark squares at home as long as you can, and move the outside ones first.
Trade when ahead
Checkers is solved: with perfect play both sides draw, so wins come from small material edges. When you are one piece up, trade at every chance. Swapping evenly turns a twelve to eleven edge into a three to two edge.
Bait the forced jump
Captures are mandatory, so a piece you hand over is a move you control. Offer one where the jump pulls their piece onto a square you can double jump, and you come out ahead.
Inside Reel Games
Checkers in the swipe feed
Checkers sits one swipe away in the same vertical feed as everything else. Land on it and the board is already set, with no loading screen in between. The whole game runs on your phone, so a tunnel or an airplane seat does not interrupt a match, and finishing one never puts an ad in front of the next.
Good for a long wait somewhere with no signal.
Next up
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They are all in the same app, so trying one costs a swipe.
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Checkers is one of 47
Free to download, no ads, and the whole library keeps working when your signal does not.