Having been focused on the good old checkerboard the last few weeks, I thought I’d close out August with an actual checker variant.
While not quite as overdone in terms of variants created as chess, a game with hundreds of variant ideas, some great Grand and Omega Chess coming to mind, but most half-baked and bad, there are many divergent rulesets for checkers.
Many, at least the older variants, are regional in nature. It is obvious as checkers spread from country to country changes were made locally.
Through the years many of the variants stayed in play within localized regions, although in many cases I suspect the rules evolved in those years too.
And that brings us to Gothic Checkers.
Gothic Checkers is an old German draughts variant also known as ‘Altdeutsche Dame’ in Germany.
The exact era of origin appears lost to time, but the scant literature I have seen suggested Gothic Checkers was influenced by Turkish Draughts, which is a common form of checkers widely played in the Middle-East, where it is known as Dama, created in about 1400.
Gothic Checkers is played on an 8x8 square board, each player starting with 16 stones, eight on each of the two back ranks (the game is not constricted to one colour of square on a common checkerboard.
Pieces move one cell diagonally forward, which is rather typical of many checker variants.
However, capture is more robust in Gothic Checkers.
Pieces capture in any of the five cells directly forward, diagonally forward, or sideways.
Capture is mandatory, again rather common to checkers, and if there are several choices, the player must capture the largest number.
A piece promotes to a king when it reaches the last row.
Kings may move and attack in any of the eight directions. Kings can only attack adjacent pieces, or at least that is the most common interpretation of the king move in Gothic Checkers.
A suggested variant has a King moving and capturing at any distance like the so-called flying kings in Dama (Turkish Draughts) or International Draughts.
On the World of Abstracts homepage (http://homepages.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/) an excellent resource for lovers of checkers, the exact history of the king in Gothic Checkers is unclear.
“According to Ralf Gering, Gothic Checkers is actually known as “Altdeutsche Dame” (or in Old German:”Damm-Spel”). He also says: The old books don’t say how far the kings are permitted to move,” detailed the website.
“A new book by R. F. Müller which is quite reliable as judged by the other rules it gives (of draughts variants and Salta) says that that the king may only move one square …
“The strange thing is that Altdeutsche Dame obviously influenced Turkish Draughts (which was invented shortly after the Turks tried to conquer the capital of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Vienna, in 1683) which has long-ranging kings. Did the Turks invent the long range independently? The France introduced the long-ranging king’s move in about 1650 and the new rule rapidly spread to Germany. Perhaps the early variant of Altdeutsche Dame had indeed the short move (as explained by you, i.e. the move of the modern Chess King), but later adopted the long range (i.e. the move of the modern Chess Queen). Another strange thing is that the old game books state that you must choose the move which captures most enemy pieces. This is a rather modern rule usually associated with the long-range. It appears that the rules are not completely known from the old sources …”
What the uncertainty in the rules allows is for players themselves to explore both options.
Certainly a flying king dramatically changes the game as it can plough through an opponent’s force to devastating effect. A game with flying kings focuses much more attention on blocking king creation.
The single move king slows the game in some ways, and allows a bit more in terms of late game structured tactics.
Try both and enjoy.
