Play Arab Checkers

How to Play Arab Checkers

Arab Checkers — Arab Dama, also called Bahraini Checkers — is played on an 8×8 board where every one of the 64 squares is in play, so there is no chequer to follow. Each player starts with 16 men filling their second and third rows; the back row is empty. White moves first. Nothing moves diagonally: men step straight ahead or sideways, and kings slide along ranks and files like a chess rook.

The rules are the same as Turkish Checkers. Ratrout records Arab Dama as "same as Turkish", with two regional customs attached: warning your opponent before you take a piece is optional, and in Bahrain a player under threat must move the threatened man if they can. This site does not enforce that Bahraini constraint — it plays the common rules shared with Turkish.

Rules

• Men move one square forward or sideways to an empty square — never backward, never diagonally
• Men capture the same way, jumping an adjacent enemy piece into the empty square directly beyond it
• Kings move any distance along a rank or file, and capture a piece on that line by landing on any empty square beyond it
• Capturing is mandatory, and you must play the sequence that captures the most pieces
• Captured pieces are removed as they are jumped, so a later jump in the same sequence can cross a square that has just been cleared — but no piece can be jumped twice
• A capture sequence may not turn straight back on itself: no 180° about-turn between two jumps
• A man that reaches the far row in the middle of a capture keeps capturing sideways along that row as a man, and crowns only if the sequence ends there

Winning

Capture all opponent pieces, or leave them with no legal move. One piece each is an immediate draw.

You can also play against a real opponent: hit Play Online to be paired with another player, or create a private game and share the link or code with a friend. No account needed.

Arab Checkers belongs to the orthogonal family, alongside Turkish Checkers and apart from the diagonal games like American Checkers and International Draughts — see how the whole family relates in our guide to checkers variants, or browse every strategy lesson.