International Draughts has a strange reputation. It’s the deepest and most widely played game in the checkers family, the one with world championships and a governing federation. And at the highest level, it has a well-known weakness: too many games between strong players end in a draw. Draw rates in top play are chronic enough that the game’s own community has spent a century designing rules and whole variants to fight them.

This post is about that fight: why the draws happen, what the official rulebook does about them, and the more radical fixes players have invented.

Why the game drifts toward draws

The draw problem isn’t bad luck. It’s built into the rules that make the game exciting in the first place.

The star of International Draughts is the flying king. Once a man reaches the far row, it becomes a piece that slides any distance along a diagonal and captures from long range. That power cuts both ways. A flying king is a devastating attacker, but it’s an even better defender: a single king patrolling a long diagonal can hold off a much larger force, because any piece that steps into its line can be taken from across the board.

That defensive power shows up most clearly in the endgame. In standard International rules, two kings cannot force a win against one king. Games researcher Mats Winther, who has documented dozens of draughts variants, points to exactly this ending when he explains anti-draw designs: the whole point of the “killer” rule we’ll get to below is that it “makes two Dames beat one.” Under normal rules, they don’t.

So when two evenly matched players trade down carefully, which is exactly what strong players do, the game funnels toward endings where neither side can make progress. Material is equal, the kings are too strong to trap, and the position goes nowhere. At club level this rarely matters, because someone blunders first. At championship level, nobody blunders.

The FMJD’s answer: a draw law

The FMJD, the World Draughts Federation, didn’t try to eliminate draws. It codified them. Its rulebook contains the most detailed draw law in the checkers family, a set of counters that end a dead game instead of letting it shuffle on forever. There are three parts.

Threefold repetition. If the same position occurs three times with the same player to move, the game is drawn. This is the familiar rule from chess: if you’re repeating, you’re not making progress.

The 25-move counter. If 25 moves pass for each side with no capture and no man moved, the game is drawn. Only kings gliding back and forth can produce a sequence like that, so this rule detects exactly the king-versus-king standoff described above and calls it what it is.

The endgame counters. Two specific endings get their own shorter clocks. A lone king defending against three pieces that include a king is drawn after 16 moves by each side. A lone king against two pieces including a king is drawn after just 5 moves by each side. These are positions the rulebook already knows are drawn with correct play, so the counters simply stop the stronger side from grinding on in hope of a mistake. The full rules, draw law included, are on our International Draughts rules page.

The draw law is honest bookkeeping. It shortens dead games, but it doesn’t produce fewer of them. For that, players had to change the game itself.

The designers’ answers

The most famous attempt in the modern era is Killer Draughts, invented by Christian Freeling in 2003. It changes one rule: when the last piece a king captures is another king, the capturing king must halt on the square directly behind its victim instead of flying on to any square beyond. That single restriction flips the critical endgame — two kings now beat one — and the drawn endings that anchor the standard game stop being safe harbors. The results were dramatic: Amsterdam tournaments in 2004 and 2005 played under Killer rules recorded draw rates around five percent, against the chronic rates of the standard game. Winther liked the idea enough to offer a “killer” option on several of the 8x8 variants he has implemented.

Dam Lombok goes further. Played on the Indonesian island of Lombok and, per BoardGameGeek, sometimes contested in Dutch tournaments as “Lombok Dammen,” it uses full International rules with one added win condition: the first player to promote a man wins the game outright. There is no drawn-out endgame because there is barely an endgame at all; the whole struggle is the race to the back row. It’s a zero-draw design hiding inside a traditional game.

And in Ghana, the local 10x10 game Damii carries its own anti-draw device: a player reduced to a single piece loses. That one rule, recorded by both Sultan Ratrout’s FMJD-hosted survey and Winther, deletes the classic “lone king holds the draw” ending entirely. If your last piece is all you have, you’ve already lost.

These aren’t the only attempts. Herman Hoogland’s 1923 variant, billed as the “Esperanto of Checkers,” was designed against the draw problem and spread to some twenty countries before fading after his death in 1956, and designers were still at it in the 2010s and 2020s with Juri Anikejev’s Modern Draughts and Zapawa’s Constitutional Draughts. The draw problem keeps attracting inventors because it’s a real, well-defined puzzle.

A flaw only at the summit

Here’s the thing to keep in perspective: the draw problem is a symptom of depth. Draws pile up at the top because International Draughts is balanced enough, and its best players precise enough, that neither side can force an error. Chess has the same affliction for the same reason. For everyone below world-championship level, the game is sharp, tactical, and very winnable — the 20-piece armies and flying kings produce combinations that 8x8 checkers simply can’t. (For how the 10x10 game rose to the top of the family in the first place, see our history of checkers.)

So don’t let the grandmasters’ draw rates put you off. Play International Draughts here, and if the anti-draw variants have you curious about the wider family, our guide to checkers variants maps out all the branches.