Put a Pool Checkers board next to an American Checkers board and you cannot tell them apart. Both games use the standard 8x8 board, both give each player 12 pieces on the dark squares of their three nearest rows, and in both, Black moves first. Captures are mandatory in both games, and when several capturing lines are available, both let you choose any one of them — neither game forces you to take the line that captures the most pieces, the way Brazilian and International Draughts do.

Then the kings show up, and the two games stop resembling each other at all.

The differences that matter

Four rules separate the games, and each one changes how the game feels to play.

1. Men capture backward in Pool. In American Checkers, an ordinary man moves forward and captures forward, full stop. Nothing threatens the squares behind it. In Pool, men still move forward only, but they capture in all four diagonal directions. That one change means no piece on a Pool board is ever safely “past” an enemy man. Multi-jumps can zigzag back the way they came, and combinations that would be impossible in the American game are routine in Pool.

2. Kings fly in Pool. An American king moves and captures one square at a time, forward or backward. It is stronger than a man, but only a little — it still has to walk. A Pool king is a long-range piece: it slides any number of empty squares along a diagonal, captures an enemy piece from a distance, and lands on any empty square beyond it on the same line. A single flying king can control two full diagonals at once, which is why Pool endgames revolve around who crowns first and American endgames revolve around slowly herding the opponent into a corner.

3. Crowning works differently in mid-capture. In American Checkers, a man that reaches the back row by a jump ends its turn there, even if more jumps would be available to it as a king. In Pool, a man that passes through the far row in the middle of a capture sequence keeps jumping as a man, and only crowns if the sequence actually ends on the far row. It sounds like a technicality, but it decides real games: in Pool you cannot pick up a king as a bonus in the middle of a combination.

4. Pool has a codified endgame clock. The American game, as we host it, is drawn by threefold repetition or when neither side captures or moves a man for long enough. Pool adds a numeric rule on top: a side with three kings, facing a lone king, must win within 13 moves by each side or the game is a draw. It is a small piece of tournament law that tells you something about the tradition behind the game — enough serious endgames have been played that the community wrote a rule to stop the hopeless ones.

If you want the complete rule sets rather than the contrasts, we keep full pages for both: the American Checkers rules and the Pool Checkers rules.

Where Pool Checkers comes from

On the family tree, Pool sits closer to the big international game than to its American board-mate. Per BoardGameGeek, its nearest relative is Brazilian Checkers — the 8x8 edition of International rules — and the two differ in only one rule: Brazilian forces you to take the maximum-capture line, Pool lets you choose freely. One BGG description calls Pool “International Checkers on a smaller board with different jump rules.”

Culturally, Pool is an American story. The game is very popular in the southern United States, particularly in the African-American community, where it built a strong tournament tradition under the American Pool Checker Association (APCA). And it travels: BoardGameGeek records tournaments in the USA, the Bahamas, Guyana, South Africa, Malawi, Uganda, and Zambia.

The tradition is still being standardized, too. In correspondence collected by rules researcher Basim Ratrout, Jake Kacher’s “Unified Pool” rule set proposes normalizing the game to a white-first move and a 12-move endgame rule, a reminder that even a game this established has living regional differences. That kind of ongoing negotiation over the “official” rules runs through the whole family — our history of checkers is full of it.

Which should you play first?

If you are new to checkers entirely, start with American Checkers. Forward-only men and one-square kings mean fewer things to track, and the tactics you learn — forced captures, two-for-one shots, controlling the double corner — carry over everywhere.

If you already know the American game and want more fireworks on the same board, Pool Checkers is the natural next step. You keep the familiar 8x8 setup and the free choice of captures, and you add backward captures and flying kings — the two rules that make the middle game sharper and the endgame faster. It is also the gentlest on-ramp to Brazilian and International Draughts, since it shares their core mechanics without the maximum-capture bookkeeping.

Both games are free to play here, against the AI or hot-seat with a friend. And if you want to see where they sit among the rest of the family, our guide to checkers variants compares every branch side by side.