Italian draughts rules
Italian draughts is played on an 8×8 board with 12 pieces each. Men capture forward only and cannot capture kings, and a strict priority order decides which capture you must make.
Board and starting position
The board has 8×8 squares, and only the dark squares are used. Each player starts with 12 men on the 3 rows nearest to them. White moves first.
The board is placed so that the long diagonal runs from the bottom-right corner to the top-left corner.
How ordinary pieces move
A man moves one square diagonally forward onto an empty square. It never moves backward without capturing.
Compulsory capture
If you can capture, you must.
A man captures by jumping over an adjacent enemy piece onto the empty square directly behind it, forward only.
A man cannot capture a king.
If the capturing piece can capture again, it must continue. Captured pieces are removed only after the whole move, and no piece can be jumped twice.
If there is a choice: take the most pieces; if that is equal, capture with a king rather than with a man; then take the most kings; then take the sequence that captures a king first.
Kings
A man that reaches the far row becomes a king. If this happens during a capture, the move ends there, even if more pieces could be taken.
A king moves one square diagonally, forward or backward.
A king captures like a man, but in every direction.
Winning and drawing
- You win when the opponent has no pieces left or cannot make a legal move.
- The game is drawn if the same position occurs three times.
- The game is drawn if 40 moves by each side pass with only kings on the board and no capture.